Democracy Now! - Extraordinary Renditionhttp://www.democracynow.org/topics/extraordinary_rendition
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144144Democracy Now! - Extraordinary Renditionen-USDemocracy Now! - Extraordinary RenditionA Debate on Torture: Legal Architect of CIA Secret Prisons, Rendition vs. Human Rights Attorneyhttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/28/a_debate_on_torture_legal_architect
tag:democracynow.org,2014-03-28:en/story/b60082 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing to vote as soon as April 4th to declassify part of the committee&#8217;s 6,000-page study on the CIA&#8217;s secret detention and interrogation programs. The study has set off an unprecedented constitutional battle between the Senate and the CIA . Earlier this month, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of secretly removing classified documents from her staff&#8217;s computers and spying on Senate staffers and their computers in an effort to undermine the panel&#8217;s report.
SEN . DIANNE FEINSTEIN : If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted. But, Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our Intelligence Committee. How Congress and how this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation&#8217;s intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee. I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The CIA has countered by filing a &quot;crimes report&quot; with the Department of Justice accusing Senate staffers of illegally accessing CIA documents. CIA Director John Brennan has denied Feinstein&#8217;s allegations.
JOHN BRENNAN : As far as the allegations of, you know, the CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn&#8217;t do that. I mean, that&#8217;s—that&#8217;s—that&#8217;s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. ... When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.
AMY GOODMAN : The CIA—meanwhile, the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized the Obama administration for closing its investigations into the CIA&#8217;s actions after September 11th. The U.N. report stated, quote, &quot;The Committee notes with concern that all reported investigations into enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programmes were closed in 2012 leading only to a meager number of criminal charges brought against low-level operatives.&quot;
Today we spend the hour looking at this debate. We&#8217;re joined by John Rizzo. He served as acting general counsel during much of the George W. Bush administration and was a key legal architect of the U.S. interrogation and detention program after the September 11th attacks. The Los Angeles Times described him as, quote, &quot;the most influential career lawyer in CIA history.&quot; He has recently published a book headlined Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA .
And we&#8217;re joined by human rights attorney Scott Horton. He is contributing editor at Harper&#8217;s magazine, a lecturer at Columbia&#8217;s Law School. He&#8217;s author of the forthcoming book, The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America&#8217;s Stealth Foreign Policy .
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! John Rizzo, first talk about the clash between the CIA right now and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Do you think the report should be declassified? And do you believe the CIA was spying on the Senate staff on the committee?
JOHN RIZZO : Well, it&#8217;s good to be here.
Yes, I have stated publicly that I believe that the report should be declassified. It is said to be 6,000 pages long. Estimated $50 million of taxpayer money was spent on it. Sure, I think—I think it should come out, as well as what I read is a very detailed CIA rebuttal. I say that, even though I assume that the report, given the description by Senator Feinstein and others, will be extremely critical of the CIA&#8217;s performance during that period. And, of course, that would presumably include my performance. But I do think it should come out, yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, as we just played in that clip from Senator Feinstein, she called it &quot;an un-American, brutal program&quot; of detention and interrogations. Now, you were involved in providing some of the legal context or justifications for the program post the attacks in—of 9/11. Could you talk about your assessment of that program?
JOHN RIZZO : Well, I certainly don&#8217;t—wouldn&#8217;t describe it as an un-American program, I mean, as everyone knows now, that the interrogation program was extraordinarily aggressive. And, you know, some of the techniques, particularly waterboarding, I—could be described as brutal. I don&#8217;t think any of those techniques—I didn&#8217;t at the time, and I don&#8217;t think today, that any of them rose to the legal threshold of torture.
AMY GOODMAN : Scott Horton?
SCOTT HORTON : Well, it seems to me quite clear-cut that certainly waterboarding and a number of the other techniques that were described, both used individually and in combination, do constitute torture, have been viewed as torture by the United States. The United States has very aggressively criticized other nations using them.
And when Senator Feinstein says it&#8217;s un-American, she is absolutely right. In fact, this is one of the principles on which the United States defined itself going back to the Revolutionary War and George Washington, who denounced torture and pledged that the U.S. would treat prisoners humanely in wartime. That&#8217;s been part of the nation&#8217;s birthright, up until this last conflict. So I think we are seeing something quite profound.
Also, I think this is essentially a historical study. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is not looking at a program that&#8217;s underway right now, that&#8217;s still being used. It&#8217;s a review of things that went on in the past. More—you know, certainly, most of these practices were terminated at the end of 2006. So it&#8217;s really astonishing that there is such ferocious pushback to publication of a report. And I think John Rizzo is to be commended for coming out and clearly stating, as he has, that the report should be out there and should be published.
AMY GOODMAN : John Rizzo, talk about the main argument you make in your book, Company Man .
JOHN RIZZO : Main argument about the program?
AMY GOODMAN : Overall, the main point you&#8217;re making about the CIA , the 30 years of controversy and crisis at the CIA .
JOHN RIZZO : Well, I was a—yeah, I was a career CIA lawyer. I joined as a young guy in 1976 and retired at the end of 2009, having served most of the post-9/11 period as the chief legal officer. So, the book is—obviously, a good part of it is devoted to the post-9/11 years, when I first—my name first became public. But it tracks the—I was fortunate. My career basically tracked the modern evolution of the CIA . And during the course of those 30-plus years, I was involved in virtually every crisis, controversy, screw-up that the CIA was involved in. So, I thought it was sort of an unprecedented kind of insider memoir that would use my story and my experiences and my observations to describe to the reader how the CIA has evolved in the last 30 years. And that would—that evolution would include, of course, the birth of congressional oversight that occurred right about the time I arrived, and then on through the years through all sorts of crises. The fundamental point is that the CIA is a very resilient organization. And also, it must be stated that the CIA manages to get itself into controversies every few years like clockwork.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break, then come back to this conversation, and we&#8217;re going to talk about the issues of torture and rendition that the CIA has been accused of. Our guest is John Rizzo, retired CIA attorney, who served as the agency&#8217;s acting general counsel during most of the Bush administration, author of a new book. It&#8217;s called Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA . And we&#8217;re joined by Scott Horton, a longtime human rights attorney, contributing editor at Harper&#8217;s magazine. This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back with them both in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;Adagio Ma Non Troppo,&quot; Charles Mingus, the video footage taken from this date 35 years ago, March 28, 1979, the anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island. For our radio listeners, you can go to democracynow.org and see that.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We&#8217;re spending power talking about the CIA . John Rizzo is with us in Washington, D.C., retired CIA attorney, served as the agency&#8217;s acting general counsel during most of the Bush administration. He has just written a book called Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA . And Scott Horton is with us, longtime human rights attorney and contributing editor at Harper&#8217;s magazine, also lecturer at Columbia University Law School and author of a forthcoming book called The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America&#8217;s Stealth Foreign Policy . Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, before the break you were mentioning that there&#8217;s periodic crises that erupted with the CIA&#8217;s activities. And you were, early in your career, as you say in your book, involved in one of the great constitutional crises, the Iran-Contra. You talk about how former CIA Director William Casey asked you at one point to provide the most expansive finding you could to allow the U.S. government to continue to back the particular sides that the Reagan administration then was supporting in Central America—the Guatemalan government against its leftist rebels, the Nicaraguan Contras. Could you talk about that, the finding then and in retrospect, because that turned out to be a huge battle between Congress and the administration and the CIA over foreign policy?
JOHN RIZZO : Sure, Juan. Yeah, that, the Iran-Contra scandal, occurred about 10 years into my career, and it was basically, looking back, the turning point of my career, because it was my first opportunity to have a front row seat and participate firsthand in a major confrontation and investigation between CIA and the Congress. And it—as you indicated, director, CIA director at the time, William Casey, was a very forceful, very aggressive advocate, anti-Communist advocate. And he directed me to—and I was not—I was, you know, not a senior attorney at the time, but he directed me, since I was the lawyer for the Clandestine Service, to draft authorizations for President Reagan to sign that were, to my experience to date, very aggressive. It was the—as you indicated, the Central America, the Contra crusades. It was the covert actions against the—support the mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. So, it was rather breathtaking. And, of course, the Iran-Contra scandal erupted because of CIA&#8217;s, pursuant to White House direction, Oliver North—William Casey and Oliver North concocted a scheme to trade—basically trade U.S. arms for hostages that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah was holding and divert those proceeds—unlawfully—to the Nicaraguan Contras. So it was a huge uproar, and there was a special congressional committee created. And as I say, it was a template for a number of clashes between CIA and Congress over the years.
I mean, honestly, this current contretemps—of course, I&#8217;ve been away five years now, so all I know—I don&#8217;t have any inside information, but, you know, it really strikes me as something—as a kind of—a kind of clash over congressional committee access to documents that I saw a number of times in my career. And frankly, I&#8217;m a bit flummoxed as to how it escalated, how this current thing has escalated the way it has.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Scott Horton, you are familiar with the Iran-Contra scandal and the constitutional crisis that developed then. Could you talk about your perspective on it?
SCOTT HORTON : Well, I think John used the word &quot;resilient&quot; right at the outset, and, you know, that&#8217;s clearly right. That&#8217;s one of the things I think I found most remarkable in his book. You know, we&#8217;ve been told that things like the Church Committee and the Iran-Contra probes clipped the wings of the CIA , left it weak and unwilling to go out and do its work. I never had the impression that that was true. And I think one of the things that emerges from John&#8217;s book is, in fact, how little impact these things had on the agency and its operations, which continued to be very, very aggressive. And I think also the relationship with the White House was stressed there historically, comes through very, very clearly. And, you know, that may, in the end, raise this fundamental question of how effective has congressional oversight ever been? Certainly, even in periods when there was a sharp clash in approach and views on policy between congressional overseers and the CIA , it seems it&#8217;s only very, very rarely that congressional oversight has been able to move or slow down the CIA in any way.
And, you know, that carries forward to the current controversy with this new report on torture and the way this has been slow-walked. I mean, really, it&#8217;s an amazing amount of time it&#8217;s taken to get it out. And we see the eruption of this final amazing controversy over documents which are claimed to have disappeared. But in any event, it&#8217;s a bizarre—it&#8217;s bizarre that there could be such a controversy, because the whole function of oversight involves having access to and reviewing these documents. So the suggestion that members of Congress, members of the Oversight Committee, could have done something wrong by reviewing documents, which it is their responsibility to review, is just bizarre.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, let&#8217;s talk about some concrete examples of the issues that are being looked at now. I want to ask about extraordinary rendition and the case of Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen who sued the CIA for illegally kidnapping him in Macedonia in 2003. After accusing him of being a member of al-Qaeda, the CIA flew him to a secret prison in Afghanistan and held him for five years [ sic ]. He was only released—for five months. He was only released after the CIA realized they had detained the wrong man, and left him alone on an abandoned road in Albania. While in CIA custody, El-Masri says he was repeatedly beaten, drugged, roughly interrogated by masked men, detained in squalid conditions and denied access to an attorney or his family. This is Khaled El-Masri.
KHALED EL- MASRI : [translated] They took me to this room, and I had handcuffs, and I had a blindfold. And when the door was closed, I was beaten from all sides. I was hit from all sides. I then was humiliated. And then I could hear just like—that I could hear that I was being photographed in the process when I was completely naked. Then my hands were tied to my back. I got a blindfold, and they put chains to my ankles and a sack over my head, and just like the pictures we have seen of Guantánamo, for example. Then I was dragged brutally into the airplane, and in the airport I was thrown to the floor. I was tied to the floor and to the sides of the airplane. At some point when I woke up again, I found myself in Afghanistan. I was brutally dragged off the airplane and put in the trunk of a car. I was thrown into the trunk of a car.
AMY GOODMAN : John Rizzo, talk about Khaled El-Masri and this case.
JOHN RIZZO : Well, unfortunately, I hate to do this, but the El-Masri case, the U.S. government still considers that whole episode to be classified, so I&#8217;m very—I&#8217;m constrained about talking about it in any detail. It wasn&#8217;t—I didn&#8217;t—you may notice, I didn&#8217;t talk about it in the book.
Let me just briefly say about renditions that, yes, CIA did conduct some renditions in the post-9/11 era—some, not the—it&#8217;s been alleged that there were, you know, dozens or even hundreds. But yes, CIA did conduct renditions. Renditions, however, actually go back through several administrations. It wasn&#8217;t a—it wasn&#8217;t—you know, this term &quot;extraordinary rendition&quot; I always found puzzling, because renditions were not a product of the post-9/11 era, and, in fact, the Obama administration carefully preserved its authority. At the same time when it closed the interrogation program, it carefully preserved its authority to conduct renditions. So renditions, in and of themselves, are actually a fairly well-established fact in American and world, actually, intelligence organizations.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you think it&#8217;s fair to call it kidnapping?
JOHN RIZZO : Well, sure, it&#8217;s a—yeah, I mean, it&#8217;s a euphemism. I mean, it&#8217;s taking someone against their will. You know, it&#8217;s an authorized government program, but if the term &quot;kidnapping&quot; means, you know, taking someone who doesn&#8217;t want to be taken and taking them somewhere else, then I suppose one could, you know, euphemistically, describe it that way.
AMY GOODMAN : Scott Horton, talk about this case.
SCOTT HORTON : Well, I think the Khaled El-Masri case is really significant for a number of different reasons. The first is, well, note, you know, John can&#8217;t talk about it because it&#8217;s still classified. It&#8217;s secret. And so, this is one of several cases where we see secrecy being invoked and used to cover up mistakes, because Khaled El-Masri has a name very similar to someone who was a serious al-Qaeda terrorist, and he was mistaken for that individual. And he was picked up, brutalized, tortured and imprisoned because of that mistake. That&#8217;s something that in a democratic society, you know, we should be able to talk about and discuss, and we should be able to have government accountability and closure on these issues, but secrecy is used effectively to block that.
The next major issue concerning El-Masri is the fact that this is—this is a case that went to the highest court in Europe, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They handed down a very important decision, landmark decision, what&#8217;s now viewed as perhaps their most important single judgment dealing with the torture issue. And in that decision, they concluded that the procedures that were used, that you heard Mr. El-Masri himself describe in the outtake here, did constitute torture. And they also said that the government of Macedonia had failed in its legal responsibilities by not opening a criminal inquiry and prosecuting those who were involved. And those who were involved were, by and large, CIA agents. I mean, not just any CIA agents, it included, as the Associated Press subsequently disclosed, a very, very senior CIA functionary who directed the entire thing, who subsequently went on to be the head of the Global Jihad Unit, has been a briefer in the White House and so forth. The CIA insists we shouldn&#8217;t use her name, although it&#8217;s very, very well known. So, you know, I think a hugely significant event, hugely embarrassing, but it&#8217;s something, frankly, it will behoove the United States and the CIA to just come clean about.
AMY GOODMAN : And it&#8217;s not just a mistake about the kidnapping. He lived to tell about what was done to him.
SCOTT HORTON : That&#8217;s exactly correct. And, I mean, not only that, but he became the subject of a criminal investigation in Germany. I at one point went and interviewed some of the criminal investigators in Munich who had worked on his case, and they said, &quot;Look, you know, he gave an account, and we were able to absolutely verify his account about what was done to him, including the use of psychotropic drugs and so forth,&quot; all of which has come out. They were able to make their conclusions by examining his body, by cutting his hair, dealing with hair samples and so forth. So we know from that some of the things that were done to him in his captivity, both in Macedonia and Afghanistan. And they raise very, very serious issues of violation of the law—even if he were a terrorist, but, of course, he was just a simple German green grocer, you know? And for him to have been subjected to this sort of abuse is horrible.
AMY GOODMAN : So the White House just said they did it to the right—to the wrong man.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: John Rizzo, I want to ask you about one of the most infamous, I guess, of CIA renditions, that took place in Milan, Italy, when a Muslim cleric named Abu Omar was snatched off the streets in 2003. Omar was taken to the U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Twenty-two CIA agents were later convicted in absentia in Italy for kidnapping. And last year, Sabrina De Sousa, one of the CIA agents convicted in absentia, broke her silence and spoke to the McClatchy Newspapers.
SABRINA DE SOUSA : I don&#8217;t think I could live with myself for the rest of my life knowing exactly what happened, and, in particular, knowing that the U.S. rendered an individual, Abu Omar, when they had no prosecutable evidence against him. And worse, after the rendition, it turned out there was a big misunderstanding between Cairo and Rome, because the Egyptians maintained that the only reason they issued an arrest warrant for him was at the behest of the Americans. After the rendition, Egypt came back and said, &quot;Where is the information to prosecute him?&quot; And the CIA station chief, Castelli, said, &quot;I thought you had the information.&quot; And Rome said—and Cairo said, &quot;No, we don&#8217;t. We issued this arrest warrant on your behalf. We don&#8217;t. So where is the information?&quot; And that&#8217;s why he was finally set free, because there was no prosecutable information, you know, to get him convicted and put away.
INTERVIEWER : Did Abu Omar pose an imminent and dangerous threat to American lives?
SABRINA DE SOUSA : If he was dangerous and posed an imminent and clear danger, the DIGOS , the Italian police, would have picked him up right away. He was under investigation for two years, and pretty aggressive investigation on the part of DIGOS , and they found that his activities did not meet a threshold in Italy with which to prosecute him.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: John Rizzo, I&#8217;m sure that that was one case that you came across during your time at the CIA . Could you—what can you tell us about it?
JOHN RIZZO : You know, I&#8217;m really sorry. I don&#8217;t really—don&#8217;t like to stonewall, but again, that&#8217;s a particular rendition that the U.S. government still considers classified. So, I mean, I&#8217;ll say parenthetically, I agree with my friend Scott that too much, too many things remain classified for too long. And, you know, I would be happy to talk about either one of those cases, but, you know, with deep regret, my hands are tied on that.
AMY GOODMAN : I mean, what&#8217;s interesting about this, it does go to the issue of classification. I mean, these CIA agents were tried in absentia. This is all brought out in a court. You have this CIA agent speaking about it publicly, and yet the CIA says you cannot talk about this.
JOHN RIZZO : Well, I&#8217;m afraid, yeah. I mean, I don&#8217;t disagree with that, with what you describe. I mean, I worked with Ms. De Sousa. She was a fine officer. But, in fact, she was—you know, that sound bite, she was—she retired from the agency, but she was not given authorization to talk about the program, and neither am I.
AMY GOODMAN : Scott Horton, if you can tell us what exactly happened here? Clearly, she and the other agents cannot go to Europe, as they were convicted in absentia.
SCOTT HORTON : Well, we had 26 people convicted. I mean, I think this is one of the things that demonstrates the huge risk of this program and the lack of just simple wisdom being applied in the selection of targets. I think—to the extent this program was selected against people who really presented an imminent danger and were plotters of hijackings and things of that sort, I don&#8217;t think it was going to raise that much of an issue in Europe or elsewhere, but to the extent that it focused on people like Abu Omar or like Khaled El-Masri, it did, and it&#8217;s very, very embarrassing. And in this case, we see 26 people being convicted. We—
AMY GOODMAN : So they kidnap him off the streets of Milan.
SCOTT HORTON : And he was taken to Aviano Air Base, involving an Air Force officer, who then winds up also being charged at the outset. And then he&#8217;s taken to Ramstein in Germany, and then, from there taken, to Egypt. And I have to say, in looking at—
AMY GOODMAN : And what happened to him?
SCOTT HORTON : And in Egypt, he&#8217;s held, and he&#8217;s interrogated for quite some time. The Egyptian come back, ultimately saying, &quot;We don&#8217;t get it. I mean, this guy really is not an important figure. He doesn&#8217;t really have important information.&quot; And at this point, the embarrassment factor weighs in, and the CIA just wants him to be held. In fact, I&#8217;ve interviewed people in Cairo who have confirmed, you know, they were put under intense pressure by the CIA to keep him quiet and to hold him there, basically because they were afraid of what he would come out and say. Well, this is nonsense, again. And I think, in the case of Italy—if we look back, you know, there were people in the intelligence community who went to Ronald Reagan when the Achille Lauro incident occurred and said, &quot;Let&#8217;s just swoop in and grab one of the terrorists who&#8217;s being held by the Italians.&quot; And Reagan said, you know, &quot;We don&#8217;t do that, because that&#8217;s going to damage our long-term relations with an important NATO ally.&quot; Reagan was absolutely right. And here, I think you see what happens when you take the wrong course.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, I wanted to ask you about one topic I think you can talk about. In 2010, in his first major interview since leaving office, former President George Bush admitted that he approved the waterboarding of prisoners. Bush&#8217;s remarks came in an interview with NBC&#8217;s Matt Lauer.
MATT LAUER : Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
GEORGE W. BUSH : Because the lawyers said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I&#8217;m not a lawyer. And—but you got to trust the judgment of people around you. And I do.
MATT LAUER : You say it&#8217;s legal, and the lawyers told me.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Yeah. ... First of all, we used this technique on three people.
MATT LAUER : Mm-hmm.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Captured a lot of people and used it on three. We gained valuable information to protect the country, and it was the right thing to do, as far as I&#8217;m concerned.
MATT LAUER : So, if it&#8217;s legal, President Bush, then if an American is taken into custody in a foreign country, not necessarily a uniformed American—
GEORGE W. BUSH : Look, I&#8217;m not going to debate the issue, Matt. I really—
MATT LAUER : I&#8217;m just asking. Would it be OK for a foreign country to waterboard an American citizen?
GEORGE W. BUSH : It&#8217;s—all I ask is that people read the book. And they can reach the same conclusion if they would have made the same decision I made or not.
MATT LAUER : You&#8217;d make the same decision again today?
GEORGE W. BUSH : Yeah, I would.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, in your book, you don&#8217;t recall the events quite the same way as President Bush recalled them.
JOHN RIZZO : Yeah, yeah, Juan, it&#8217;s a rather curious episode. In his memoir, President Bush, you know, claimed that he was involved in the interrogation program from the beginning and, in fact, approved all the proposed techniques in advance. He talked about having vetoed a couple of them. And these are very vivid conversations he claimed to have had with George Tenet. This would be in the 2002, 2003 time frame. And I didn&#8217;t—reading that, I didn&#8217;t recall any of that. I dealt with George Tenet daily in those days. I mean, I was consumed with this program in the start-up period, as was he. He had never told me about having talked to President Bush about this—what was then a new program, much less getting any guidance or directions from the president. So, I mean—and when the book came out, I actually reached out to George Tenet, because I thought I had missed something. I said, &quot;Did you have these conversations with President Bush?&quot; And he said he had no recollection of ever having discussed the interrogation program with the president in those early days. So, I mean, frankly, I found the passage in President Bush&#8217;s memoir bewildering.
AMY GOODMAN : And just mentioning that passage in Decision Points , he wrote, &quot;I took a look at the list of techniques. There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them.&quot; Bush went on to write, quote, &quot;Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on Khalid Sheaikh Mohammed. ... &#39;Damn right,&#39; I said.&quot; Scott Horton?
SCOTT HORTON : Well, you know, George Bush, when he&#8217;s asked why he says, &quot;The lawyers tell me it was legal,&quot; but, of course, the Department of Justice was certainly one of the blackest chapters in the history of the Department of Justice, this whole affair. And when they go in and do their internal review, they say, &quot;We look at the two lawyers who were involved preparing these memoranda, and we&#8217;re very concerned that the offer of preferment or advancement given to these lawyers&quot;—one was offered—had an appointment to the court of appeals dangled in front of him, the other was offered an assistant attorney general position—&quot;that this influenced and undermined their exercise of independent professional judgment.&quot; So I think it&#8217;s a good demonstration of how power can corrupt and how lawyers not exercising independent professional judgment can lead to huge problems for the country down the road.
AMY GOODMAN : If Bush didn&#8217;t authorize it, what does it mean?
SCOTT HORTON : In this case, I think there&#8217;s no question but that responsibility rests ultimately with the president for this, whether he was specifically conscious of the individual techniques or participated in briefings or not. I think one thing that John Rizzo&#8217;s book does, really in spades, is show how careful the CIA was, going both to the Justice Department to get opinions, but then ultimately also to the White House, preparing this, briefing it in detail, getting consent. And when we see that the White House has withheld 900—or, 9,000 pages of documents from the Senate Select Committee, I think this portrait that Rizzo provides gives us a very clear sense of what those documents are likely to be.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break, then come back to this discussion. We&#8217;re spending the hour with John Rizzo, retired CIA attorney, author of Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA , and Scott Horton, human rights attorney. When we come back, who should be held responsible for rendition, what all here agree is kidnapping for torture? Should administration officials be brought to trial? This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;re back in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guests are John Rizzo, a retired CIA attorney, served as the agency&#8217;s acting general counsel during most of the Bush administration, author of the new book, Company Man ; we&#8217;re also joined by Scott Horton, human rights attorney, lecturer on human rights at Columbia University. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, I wanted to ask you about a policy issue in terms of the growth and expansion of the CIA in recent decades, and especially its relationship to the official American military. You take, for instance, Guantánamo—Guantánamo is a military base, but yet it also became the site of the CIA interrogations of prisoners there in the war against terrorism—and the CIA&#8217;s possession of its own air force, its own ability to attack people around the world with missiles in targeted killings. What do you see as the tension or problems between the established military and its system of accountability to the public versus the CIA , as the CIA continues to expand its efforts around the world?
JOHN RIZZO : Yes, Juan. Well, that&#8217;s a fascinating question. Before I—I&#8217;ll try to be concise, but before I start, I should just briefly clarify: The CIA interrogation program did not take place at Guantánamo; it took place at—well, again, another new word in the post-9/11 lexicon—the black sites overseas. So there were no CIA interrogations done at Guantánamo. That was strictly a military DOD operation.
But to get to your larger question, yes, there has been. And I certainly—and certainly, 9/11, as it did a lot of things, accelerated this new phenomenon of increased CIA involvement in paramilitary activities—you know, creation of, as you indicated, an air force—that would seem to parallel the normal, existing, traditional roles and duties of the U.S. military. And, you know, personally, I was—I did get increasingly concerned about this overlap between the CIA&#8217;s traditional, historic functions and getting into, to my mind, was activities that could be more effectively carried out by the Pentagon, which, after all, is a much bigger organization with much more money at its disposal. So I think it&#8217;s a—I think it&#8217;s a trend that bears watching.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Scott Horton?
SCOTT HORTON : Well, I think, at the end, when we review all these issues surrounding the CIA , this is the big question we come back to at the end, which is: Is the CIA&#8217;s mission really true to the original vision of the National Security Act? And I think it&#8217;s changed, because that original vision was it was going to be an intelligence-gathering and analysis organ that was going to be largely divorced from operations. It may have a little bit of authority on rare occasions to engage in covert operations, but I think the idea was it would be quite rare. Largely, operations would be controlled by the military. And I think what we see today is we see an entity that has paramilitary units, has its own air force, has been waging a seven-, eight-, nine-year drone war in Pakistan with hundreds of strikes—more than 300 by now. You know, that just seems almost impossible to reconcile with this original vision.
And the question—I think you come back to a question that Harry Truman asked in the end of 1963, after the failed Bay of Pigs incident after President Kennedy&#8217;s assassination. He said he was really very worried about what had happened to the CIA . It really—it had become so heavily engaged in operations that its intelligence-gathering and analysis function was failing. And, of course, today we see—you know, we see a Russian invasion in Crimea, and only days before that, we see CIA analysts on the Hill saying that there&#8217;s no realistic risk of such a thing happening. You know, we see a failure to foresee the Arab Spring. So this sort of analytical function is falling down. There&#8217;s a direct connection, I think, between those failures and the heavy emphasis on operations.
AMY GOODMAN : John Rizzo, you were the CIA&#8217;s chief legal officer for seven years. In 2011, you were quoted by Newsweek in an article titled &quot;Inside the Killing Machine.&quot; You were quoted describing drone killings as, quote, &quot;murder,&quot; and you described the target list as, quote, &quot;basically a hit list.&quot; Would you stand by those characterizations now?
JOHN RIZZO : Well, Amy, that interview was a—to be honest about it, was a mistake on my part. I thought I was off the record; the reporter thought we were on the record. So, I said things in that interview that I never wanted or intended to be published. But, you know, the drone program is what it is: It&#8217;s a program to target and kill terrorists. And, you know, it is directed and authorized by the president of the United States. I think I—you know, I should not have used the term &quot;murder,&quot; but it is definitely a killing program, and it is a—it is a killing machine.
AMY GOODMAN : And the list that the president has, that he takes responsibility, a hit list?
JOHN RIZZO : Well, I mean, again, it was a euphemism, the—again, probably an unpolitic choice of words, but it is—you know, when you get right down to it, it is a list of people who are targeted for lethal action, so one—
AMY GOODMAN : And we do know, from all the information out, thousands of innocent people have been killed. I mean, you look at the NYU -Stanford report , &quot;Living Under Drones,&quot; and other information that&#8217;s come out. I wanted to ask about this issue of prosecution. Scott Horton, who should be held accountable?
SCOTT HORTON : Well, in the end of the day, of course, John, in his book, talks about the prosecution or the investigations that were undertaken both under President Bush and under President Obama that led to no action and no prosecution. And those investigations started from the bottom. They started with the allegations—they started, actually, with the CIA inspector general&#8217;s report and then focused on individual CIA officers. And I think there&#8217;s a fundamental problem with the U.S. Department of Justice dealing with these things. And that is that it&#8217;s almost impossible to deal with them divorced from the policy choices that was made. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, it&#8217;s those who set the policies who bear ultimate responsibility if criminal violations are determined. And here we had the Department of Justice involved in this process of fixing the policies, so it really couldn&#8217;t investigate itself. And so I think that&#8217;s the dilemma of examination and prosecution. And I think we see, even now, with the Senate Select Committee&#8217;s report, that there&#8217;s no discussion really of accountability. Philip Giraldi, in the piece he did in The American Conservative , in fact, flags that point. And that&#8217;s right. You know, we&#8217;ve got a—we have a clear problem there. And—
AMY GOODMAN : Should Bush be prosecuted? Should Rumsfeld? Should Cheney?
SCOTT HORTON : There should be—
AMY GOODMAN : Should President Obama?
SCOTT HORTON : There should be a really independent investigation, which still hasn&#8217;t occurred, as far as I&#8217;m concerned. And the basis for it has got to be disclosure of much more factual detail that&#8217;s still—still not there.
I want to add one other thing, and that is, John said, you know, no CIA operations at Guantánamo. That&#8217;s still a huge question. I&#8217;ve seen a lot of evidence suggesting the contrary. Certainly we have Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane operations that were going on out there.
AMY GOODMAN : Which were?
SCOTT HORTON : Which were operations geared towards perhaps turning prisoners who were about to be released, turning them into assets. Of course, we have programs like that going on in every single war. You&#8217;d be guilty of some failure not to. We&#8217;ve got a lot of evidence linking the CIA to those programs.
AMY GOODMAN : John Rizzo, even if you thought you were off the record, you do stand by what you said: You&#8217;re talking murder, hit list. Do you think that an administration official should be prosecuted?
JOHN RIZZO : Well, Amy, I mean, I can&#8217;t be obviously—I&#8217;m somewhat biased in this, since I was one of the senior officials involved in—that took part in the implementation and conception of the program. No, I don&#8217;t—look, this is why I want—I support the Senate report coming out. All of the facts should come out. The American people deserve to know what was done in their name and make their own judgments. But at this point, going back now and going back against the individuals, whether they be senior or further on down the chain, I mean, this interrogation—
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we&#8217;ll—
JOHN RIZZO : This interrogation—
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;ll have to leave it there.
JOHN RIZZO : I&#8217;m sorry.
AMY GOODMAN : But I want to thank you both for being with us. John Rizzo&#8217;s book is called Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA , served as the chief legal counsel for the CIA for seven years. And Scott Horton, thanks so much for joining us, human rights attorney, contributing editor at Harper&#8217;s magazine.
I&#8217;ll be speaking in St. Louis Saturday night, March 29th, celebrating the First Amendment. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing to vote as soon as April 4th to declassify part of the committee’s 6,000-page study on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation programs. The study has set off an unprecedented constitutional battle between the Senate and the CIA. Earlier this month, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of secretly removing classified documents from her staff’s computers and spying on Senate staffers and their computers in an effort to undermine the panel’s report.

SEN. DIANNEFEINSTEIN: If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted. But, Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our Intelligence Committee. How Congress and how this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee. I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The CIA has countered by filing a "crimes report" with the Department of Justice accusing Senate staffers of illegally accessing CIA documents. CIA Director John Brennan has denied Feinstein’s allegations.

JOHNBRENNAN: As far as the allegations of, you know, the CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. ... When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.

AMYGOODMAN: The CIA—meanwhile, the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized the Obama administration for closing its investigations into the CIA’s actions after September 11th. The U.N. report stated, quote, "The Committee notes with concern that all reported investigations into enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programmes were closed in 2012 leading only to a meager number of criminal charges brought against low-level operatives."

Today we spend the hour looking at this debate. We’re joined by John Rizzo. He served as acting general counsel during much of the George W. Bush administration and was a key legal architect of the U.S. interrogation and detention program after the September 11th attacks. The Los Angeles Times described him as, quote, "the most influential career lawyer in CIA history." He has recently published a book headlined Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA.

And we’re joined by human rights attorney Scott Horton. He is contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, a lecturer at Columbia’s Law School. He’s author of the forthcoming book, The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! John Rizzo, first talk about the clash between the CIA right now and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Do you think the report should be declassified? And do you believe the CIA was spying on the Senate staff on the committee?

JOHNRIZZO: Well, it’s good to be here.

Yes, I have stated publicly that I believe that the report should be declassified. It is said to be 6,000 pages long. Estimated $50 million of taxpayer money was spent on it. Sure, I think—I think it should come out, as well as what I read is a very detailed CIA rebuttal. I say that, even though I assume that the report, given the description by Senator Feinstein and others, will be extremely critical of the CIA’s performance during that period. And, of course, that would presumably include my performance. But I do think it should come out, yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, as we just played in that clip from Senator Feinstein, she called it "an un-American, brutal program" of detention and interrogations. Now, you were involved in providing some of the legal context or justifications for the program post the attacks in—of 9/11. Could you talk about your assessment of that program?

JOHNRIZZO: Well, I certainly don’t—wouldn’t describe it as an un-American program, I mean, as everyone knows now, that the interrogation program was extraordinarily aggressive. And, you know, some of the techniques, particularly waterboarding, I—could be described as brutal. I don’t think any of those techniques—I didn’t at the time, and I don’t think today, that any of them rose to the legal threshold of torture.

AMYGOODMAN: Scott Horton?

SCOTTHORTON: Well, it seems to me quite clear-cut that certainly waterboarding and a number of the other techniques that were described, both used individually and in combination, do constitute torture, have been viewed as torture by the United States. The United States has very aggressively criticized other nations using them.

And when Senator Feinstein says it’s un-American, she is absolutely right. In fact, this is one of the principles on which the United States defined itself going back to the Revolutionary War and George Washington, who denounced torture and pledged that the U.S. would treat prisoners humanely in wartime. That’s been part of the nation’s birthright, up until this last conflict. So I think we are seeing something quite profound.

Also, I think this is essentially a historical study. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is not looking at a program that’s underway right now, that’s still being used. It’s a review of things that went on in the past. More—you know, certainly, most of these practices were terminated at the end of 2006. So it’s really astonishing that there is such ferocious pushback to publication of a report. And I think John Rizzo is to be commended for coming out and clearly stating, as he has, that the report should be out there and should be published.

AMYGOODMAN: John Rizzo, talk about the main argument you make in your book, Company Man.

JOHNRIZZO: Main argument about the program?

AMYGOODMAN: Overall, the main point you’re making about the CIA, the 30 years of controversy and crisis at the CIA.

JOHNRIZZO: Well, I was a—yeah, I was a career CIA lawyer. I joined as a young guy in 1976 and retired at the end of 2009, having served most of the post-9/11 period as the chief legal officer. So, the book is—obviously, a good part of it is devoted to the post-9/11 years, when I first—my name first became public. But it tracks the—I was fortunate. My career basically tracked the modern evolution of the CIA. And during the course of those 30-plus years, I was involved in virtually every crisis, controversy, screw-up that the CIA was involved in. So, I thought it was sort of an unprecedented kind of insider memoir that would use my story and my experiences and my observations to describe to the reader how the CIA has evolved in the last 30 years. And that would—that evolution would include, of course, the birth of congressional oversight that occurred right about the time I arrived, and then on through the years through all sorts of crises. The fundamental point is that the CIA is a very resilient organization. And also, it must be stated that the CIA manages to get itself into controversies every few years like clockwork.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this conversation, and we’re going to talk about the issues of torture and rendition that the CIA has been accused of. Our guest is John Rizzo, retired CIA attorney, who served as the agency’s acting general counsel during most of the Bush administration, author of a new book. It’s called Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. And we’re joined by Scott Horton, a longtime human rights attorney, contributing editor at Harper’s magazine. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with them both in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: "Adagio Ma Non Troppo," Charles Mingus, the video footage taken from this date 35 years ago, March 28, 1979, the anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island. For our radio listeners, you can go to democracynow.org and see that.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We’re spending power talking about the CIA. John Rizzo is with us in Washington, D.C., retired CIA attorney, served as the agency’s acting general counsel during most of the Bush administration. He has just written a book called Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. And Scott Horton is with us, longtime human rights attorney and contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, also lecturer at Columbia University Law School and author of a forthcoming book called The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, before the break you were mentioning that there’s periodic crises that erupted with the CIA’s activities. And you were, early in your career, as you say in your book, involved in one of the great constitutional crises, the Iran-Contra. You talk about how former CIA Director William Casey asked you at one point to provide the most expansive finding you could to allow the U.S. government to continue to back the particular sides that the Reagan administration then was supporting in Central America—the Guatemalan government against its leftist rebels, the Nicaraguan Contras. Could you talk about that, the finding then and in retrospect, because that turned out to be a huge battle between Congress and the administration and the CIA over foreign policy?

JOHNRIZZO: Sure, Juan. Yeah, that, the Iran-Contra scandal, occurred about 10 years into my career, and it was basically, looking back, the turning point of my career, because it was my first opportunity to have a front row seat and participate firsthand in a major confrontation and investigation between CIA and the Congress. And it—as you indicated, director, CIA director at the time, William Casey, was a very forceful, very aggressive advocate, anti-Communist advocate. And he directed me to—and I was not—I was, you know, not a senior attorney at the time, but he directed me, since I was the lawyer for the Clandestine Service, to draft authorizations for President Reagan to sign that were, to my experience to date, very aggressive. It was the—as you indicated, the Central America, the Contra crusades. It was the covert actions against the—support the mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. So, it was rather breathtaking. And, of course, the Iran-Contra scandal erupted because of CIA’s, pursuant to White House direction, Oliver North—William Casey and Oliver North concocted a scheme to trade—basically trade U.S. arms for hostages that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah was holding and divert those proceeds—unlawfully—to the Nicaraguan Contras. So it was a huge uproar, and there was a special congressional committee created. And as I say, it was a template for a number of clashes between CIA and Congress over the years.

I mean, honestly, this current contretemps—of course, I’ve been away five years now, so all I know—I don’t have any inside information, but, you know, it really strikes me as something—as a kind of—a kind of clash over congressional committee access to documents that I saw a number of times in my career. And frankly, I’m a bit flummoxed as to how it escalated, how this current thing has escalated the way it has.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Scott Horton, you are familiar with the Iran-Contra scandal and the constitutional crisis that developed then. Could you talk about your perspective on it?

SCOTTHORTON: Well, I think John used the word "resilient" right at the outset, and, you know, that’s clearly right. That’s one of the things I think I found most remarkable in his book. You know, we’ve been told that things like the Church Committee and the Iran-Contra probes clipped the wings of the CIA, left it weak and unwilling to go out and do its work. I never had the impression that that was true. And I think one of the things that emerges from John’s book is, in fact, how little impact these things had on the agency and its operations, which continued to be very, very aggressive. And I think also the relationship with the White House was stressed there historically, comes through very, very clearly. And, you know, that may, in the end, raise this fundamental question of how effective has congressional oversight ever been? Certainly, even in periods when there was a sharp clash in approach and views on policy between congressional overseers and the CIA, it seems it’s only very, very rarely that congressional oversight has been able to move or slow down the CIA in any way.

And, you know, that carries forward to the current controversy with this new report on torture and the way this has been slow-walked. I mean, really, it’s an amazing amount of time it’s taken to get it out. And we see the eruption of this final amazing controversy over documents which are claimed to have disappeared. But in any event, it’s a bizarre—it’s bizarre that there could be such a controversy, because the whole function of oversight involves having access to and reviewing these documents. So the suggestion that members of Congress, members of the Oversight Committee, could have done something wrong by reviewing documents, which it is their responsibility to review, is just bizarre.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about some concrete examples of the issues that are being looked at now. I want to ask about extraordinary rendition and the case of Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen who sued the CIA for illegally kidnapping him in Macedonia in 2003. After accusing him of being a member of al-Qaeda, the CIA flew him to a secret prison in Afghanistan and held him for five years [sic]. He was only released—for five months. He was only released after the CIA realized they had detained the wrong man, and left him alone on an abandoned road in Albania. While in CIA custody, El-Masri says he was repeatedly beaten, drugged, roughly interrogated by masked men, detained in squalid conditions and denied access to an attorney or his family. This is Khaled El-Masri.

KHALED EL-MASRI: [translated] They took me to this room, and I had handcuffs, and I had a blindfold. And when the door was closed, I was beaten from all sides. I was hit from all sides. I then was humiliated. And then I could hear just like—that I could hear that I was being photographed in the process when I was completely naked. Then my hands were tied to my back. I got a blindfold, and they put chains to my ankles and a sack over my head, and just like the pictures we have seen of Guantánamo, for example. Then I was dragged brutally into the airplane, and in the airport I was thrown to the floor. I was tied to the floor and to the sides of the airplane. At some point when I woke up again, I found myself in Afghanistan. I was brutally dragged off the airplane and put in the trunk of a car. I was thrown into the trunk of a car.

AMYGOODMAN: John Rizzo, talk about Khaled El-Masri and this case.

JOHNRIZZO: Well, unfortunately, I hate to do this, but the El-Masri case, the U.S. government still considers that whole episode to be classified, so I’m very—I’m constrained about talking about it in any detail. It wasn’t—I didn’t—you may notice, I didn’t talk about it in the book.

Let me just briefly say about renditions that, yes, CIA did conduct some renditions in the post-9/11 era—some, not the—it’s been alleged that there were, you know, dozens or even hundreds. But yes, CIA did conduct renditions. Renditions, however, actually go back through several administrations. It wasn’t a—it wasn’t—you know, this term "extraordinary rendition" I always found puzzling, because renditions were not a product of the post-9/11 era, and, in fact, the Obama administration carefully preserved its authority. At the same time when it closed the interrogation program, it carefully preserved its authority to conduct renditions. So renditions, in and of themselves, are actually a fairly well-established fact in American and world, actually, intelligence organizations.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you think it’s fair to call it kidnapping?

JOHNRIZZO: Well, sure, it’s a—yeah, I mean, it’s a euphemism. I mean, it’s taking someone against their will. You know, it’s an authorized government program, but if the term "kidnapping" means, you know, taking someone who doesn’t want to be taken and taking them somewhere else, then I suppose one could, you know, euphemistically, describe it that way.

AMYGOODMAN: Scott Horton, talk about this case.

SCOTTHORTON: Well, I think the Khaled El-Masri case is really significant for a number of different reasons. The first is, well, note, you know, John can’t talk about it because it’s still classified. It’s secret. And so, this is one of several cases where we see secrecy being invoked and used to cover up mistakes, because Khaled El-Masri has a name very similar to someone who was a serious al-Qaeda terrorist, and he was mistaken for that individual. And he was picked up, brutalized, tortured and imprisoned because of that mistake. That’s something that in a democratic society, you know, we should be able to talk about and discuss, and we should be able to have government accountability and closure on these issues, but secrecy is used effectively to block that.

The next major issue concerning El-Masri is the fact that this is—this is a case that went to the highest court in Europe, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They handed down a very important decision, landmark decision, what’s now viewed as perhaps their most important single judgment dealing with the torture issue. And in that decision, they concluded that the procedures that were used, that you heard Mr. El-Masri himself describe in the outtake here, did constitute torture. And they also said that the government of Macedonia had failed in its legal responsibilities by not opening a criminal inquiry and prosecuting those who were involved. And those who were involved were, by and large, CIA agents. I mean, not just any CIA agents, it included, as the Associated Press subsequently disclosed, a very, very senior CIA functionary who directed the entire thing, who subsequently went on to be the head of the Global Jihad Unit, has been a briefer in the White House and so forth. The CIA insists we shouldn’t use her name, although it’s very, very well known. So, you know, I think a hugely significant event, hugely embarrassing, but it’s something, frankly, it will behoove the United States and the CIA to just come clean about.

AMYGOODMAN: And it’s not just a mistake about the kidnapping. He lived to tell about what was done to him.

SCOTTHORTON: That’s exactly correct. And, I mean, not only that, but he became the subject of a criminal investigation in Germany. I at one point went and interviewed some of the criminal investigators in Munich who had worked on his case, and they said, "Look, you know, he gave an account, and we were able to absolutely verify his account about what was done to him, including the use of psychotropic drugs and so forth," all of which has come out. They were able to make their conclusions by examining his body, by cutting his hair, dealing with hair samples and so forth. So we know from that some of the things that were done to him in his captivity, both in Macedonia and Afghanistan. And they raise very, very serious issues of violation of the law—even if he were a terrorist, but, of course, he was just a simple German green grocer, you know? And for him to have been subjected to this sort of abuse is horrible.

AMYGOODMAN: So the White House just said they did it to the right—to the wrong man.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: John Rizzo, I want to ask you about one of the most infamous, I guess, of CIA renditions, that took place in Milan, Italy, when a Muslim cleric named Abu Omar was snatched off the streets in 2003. Omar was taken to the U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Twenty-two CIA agents were later convicted in absentia in Italy for kidnapping. And last year, Sabrina De Sousa, one of the CIA agents convicted in absentia, broke her silence and spoke to the McClatchy Newspapers.

SABRINA DE SOUSA: I don’t think I could live with myself for the rest of my life knowing exactly what happened, and, in particular, knowing that the U.S. rendered an individual, Abu Omar, when they had no prosecutable evidence against him. And worse, after the rendition, it turned out there was a big misunderstanding between Cairo and Rome, because the Egyptians maintained that the only reason they issued an arrest warrant for him was at the behest of the Americans. After the rendition, Egypt came back and said, "Where is the information to prosecute him?" And the CIA station chief, Castelli, said, "I thought you had the information." And Rome said—and Cairo said, "No, we don’t. We issued this arrest warrant on your behalf. We don’t. So where is the information?" And that’s why he was finally set free, because there was no prosecutable information, you know, to get him convicted and put away.

INTERVIEWER: Did Abu Omar pose an imminent and dangerous threat to American lives?

SABRINA DE SOUSA: If he was dangerous and posed an imminent and clear danger, the DIGOS, the Italian police, would have picked him up right away. He was under investigation for two years, and pretty aggressive investigation on the part of DIGOS, and they found that his activities did not meet a threshold in Italy with which to prosecute him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: John Rizzo, I’m sure that that was one case that you came across during your time at the CIA. Could you—what can you tell us about it?

JOHNRIZZO: You know, I’m really sorry. I don’t really—don’t like to stonewall, but again, that’s a particular rendition that the U.S. government still considers classified. So, I mean, I’ll say parenthetically, I agree with my friend Scott that too much, too many things remain classified for too long. And, you know, I would be happy to talk about either one of those cases, but, you know, with deep regret, my hands are tied on that.

AMYGOODMAN: I mean, what’s interesting about this, it does go to the issue of classification. I mean, these CIA agents were tried in absentia. This is all brought out in a court. You have this CIA agent speaking about it publicly, and yet the CIA says you cannot talk about this.

JOHNRIZZO: Well, I’m afraid, yeah. I mean, I don’t disagree with that, with what you describe. I mean, I worked with Ms. De Sousa. She was a fine officer. But, in fact, she was—you know, that sound bite, she was—she retired from the agency, but she was not given authorization to talk about the program, and neither am I.

AMYGOODMAN: Scott Horton, if you can tell us what exactly happened here? Clearly, she and the other agents cannot go to Europe, as they were convicted in absentia.

SCOTTHORTON: Well, we had 26 people convicted. I mean, I think this is one of the things that demonstrates the huge risk of this program and the lack of just simple wisdom being applied in the selection of targets. I think—to the extent this program was selected against people who really presented an imminent danger and were plotters of hijackings and things of that sort, I don’t think it was going to raise that much of an issue in Europe or elsewhere, but to the extent that it focused on people like Abu Omar or like Khaled El-Masri, it did, and it’s very, very embarrassing. And in this case, we see 26 people being convicted. We—

AMYGOODMAN: So they kidnap him off the streets of Milan.

SCOTTHORTON: And he was taken to Aviano Air Base, involving an Air Force officer, who then winds up also being charged at the outset. And then he’s taken to Ramstein in Germany, and then, from there taken, to Egypt. And I have to say, in looking at—

AMYGOODMAN: And what happened to him?

SCOTTHORTON: And in Egypt, he’s held, and he’s interrogated for quite some time. The Egyptian come back, ultimately saying, "We don’t get it. I mean, this guy really is not an important figure. He doesn’t really have important information." And at this point, the embarrassment factor weighs in, and the CIA just wants him to be held. In fact, I’ve interviewed people in Cairo who have confirmed, you know, they were put under intense pressure by the CIA to keep him quiet and to hold him there, basically because they were afraid of what he would come out and say. Well, this is nonsense, again. And I think, in the case of Italy—if we look back, you know, there were people in the intelligence community who went to Ronald Reagan when the Achille Lauro incident occurred and said, "Let’s just swoop in and grab one of the terrorists who’s being held by the Italians." And Reagan said, you know, "We don’t do that, because that’s going to damage our long-term relations with an important NATO ally." Reagan was absolutely right. And here, I think you see what happens when you take the wrong course.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, I wanted to ask you about one topic I think you can talk about. In 2010, in his first major interview since leaving office, former President George Bush admitted that he approved the waterboarding of prisoners. Bush’s remarks came in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer.

MATTLAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Because the lawyers said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer. And—but you got to trust the judgment of people around you. And I do.

MATTLAUER: You say it’s legal, and the lawyers told me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah. ... First of all, we used this technique on three people.

MATTLAUER: Mm-hmm.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Captured a lot of people and used it on three. We gained valuable information to protect the country, and it was the right thing to do, as far as I’m concerned.

MATTLAUER: So, if it’s legal, President Bush, then if an American is taken into custody in a foreign country, not necessarily a uniformed American—

GEORGE W. BUSH: Look, I’m not going to debate the issue, Matt. I really—

MATTLAUER: I’m just asking. Would it be OK for a foreign country to waterboard an American citizen?

GEORGE W. BUSH: It’s—all I ask is that people read the book. And they can reach the same conclusion if they would have made the same decision I made or not.

MATTLAUER: You’d make the same decision again today?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, I would.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, in your book, you don’t recall the events quite the same way as President Bush recalled them.

JOHNRIZZO: Yeah, yeah, Juan, it’s a rather curious episode. In his memoir, President Bush, you know, claimed that he was involved in the interrogation program from the beginning and, in fact, approved all the proposed techniques in advance. He talked about having vetoed a couple of them. And these are very vivid conversations he claimed to have had with George Tenet. This would be in the 2002, 2003 time frame. And I didn’t—reading that, I didn’t recall any of that. I dealt with George Tenet daily in those days. I mean, I was consumed with this program in the start-up period, as was he. He had never told me about having talked to President Bush about this—what was then a new program, much less getting any guidance or directions from the president. So, I mean—and when the book came out, I actually reached out to George Tenet, because I thought I had missed something. I said, "Did you have these conversations with President Bush?" And he said he had no recollection of ever having discussed the interrogation program with the president in those early days. So, I mean, frankly, I found the passage in President Bush’s memoir bewildering.

AMYGOODMAN: And just mentioning that passage in Decision Points, he wrote, "I took a look at the list of techniques. There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them." Bush went on to write, quote, "Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on Khalid Sheaikh Mohammed. ... 'Damn right,' I said." Scott Horton?

SCOTTHORTON: Well, you know, George Bush, when he’s asked why he says, "The lawyers tell me it was legal," but, of course, the Department of Justice was certainly one of the blackest chapters in the history of the Department of Justice, this whole affair. And when they go in and do their internal review, they say, "We look at the two lawyers who were involved preparing these memoranda, and we’re very concerned that the offer of preferment or advancement given to these lawyers"—one was offered—had an appointment to the court of appeals dangled in front of him, the other was offered an assistant attorney general position—"that this influenced and undermined their exercise of independent professional judgment." So I think it’s a good demonstration of how power can corrupt and how lawyers not exercising independent professional judgment can lead to huge problems for the country down the road.

AMYGOODMAN: If Bush didn’t authorize it, what does it mean?

SCOTTHORTON: In this case, I think there’s no question but that responsibility rests ultimately with the president for this, whether he was specifically conscious of the individual techniques or participated in briefings or not. I think one thing that John Rizzo’s book does, really in spades, is show how careful the CIA was, going both to the Justice Department to get opinions, but then ultimately also to the White House, preparing this, briefing it in detail, getting consent. And when we see that the White House has withheld 900—or, 9,000 pages of documents from the Senate Select Committee, I think this portrait that Rizzo provides gives us a very clear sense of what those documents are likely to be.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this discussion. We’re spending the hour with John Rizzo, retired CIA attorney, author of Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, and Scott Horton, human rights attorney. When we come back, who should be held responsible for rendition, what all here agree is kidnapping for torture? Should administration officials be brought to trial? This is Democracy Now! We’re back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guests are John Rizzo, a retired CIA attorney, served as the agency’s acting general counsel during most of the Bush administration, author of the new book, Company Man; we’re also joined by Scott Horton, human rights attorney, lecturer on human rights at Columbia University. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, John Rizzo, I wanted to ask you about a policy issue in terms of the growth and expansion of the CIA in recent decades, and especially its relationship to the official American military. You take, for instance, Guantánamo—Guantánamo is a military base, but yet it also became the site of the CIA interrogations of prisoners there in the war against terrorism—and the CIA’s possession of its own air force, its own ability to attack people around the world with missiles in targeted killings. What do you see as the tension or problems between the established military and its system of accountability to the public versus the CIA, as the CIA continues to expand its efforts around the world?

JOHNRIZZO: Yes, Juan. Well, that’s a fascinating question. Before I—I’ll try to be concise, but before I start, I should just briefly clarify: The CIA interrogation program did not take place at Guantánamo; it took place at—well, again, another new word in the post-9/11 lexicon—the black sites overseas. So there were no CIA interrogations done at Guantánamo. That was strictly a military DOD operation.

But to get to your larger question, yes, there has been. And I certainly—and certainly, 9/11, as it did a lot of things, accelerated this new phenomenon of increased CIA involvement in paramilitary activities—you know, creation of, as you indicated, an air force—that would seem to parallel the normal, existing, traditional roles and duties of the U.S. military. And, you know, personally, I was—I did get increasingly concerned about this overlap between the CIA’s traditional, historic functions and getting into, to my mind, was activities that could be more effectively carried out by the Pentagon, which, after all, is a much bigger organization with much more money at its disposal. So I think it’s a—I think it’s a trend that bears watching.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Scott Horton?

SCOTTHORTON: Well, I think, at the end, when we review all these issues surrounding the CIA, this is the big question we come back to at the end, which is: Is the CIA’s mission really true to the original vision of the National Security Act? And I think it’s changed, because that original vision was it was going to be an intelligence-gathering and analysis organ that was going to be largely divorced from operations. It may have a little bit of authority on rare occasions to engage in covert operations, but I think the idea was it would be quite rare. Largely, operations would be controlled by the military. And I think what we see today is we see an entity that has paramilitary units, has its own air force, has been waging a seven-, eight-, nine-year drone war in Pakistan with hundreds of strikes—more than 300 by now. You know, that just seems almost impossible to reconcile with this original vision.

And the question—I think you come back to a question that Harry Truman asked in the end of 1963, after the failed Bay of Pigs incident after President Kennedy’s assassination. He said he was really very worried about what had happened to the CIA. It really—it had become so heavily engaged in operations that its intelligence-gathering and analysis function was failing. And, of course, today we see—you know, we see a Russian invasion in Crimea, and only days before that, we see CIA analysts on the Hill saying that there’s no realistic risk of such a thing happening. You know, we see a failure to foresee the Arab Spring. So this sort of analytical function is falling down. There’s a direct connection, I think, between those failures and the heavy emphasis on operations.

AMYGOODMAN: John Rizzo, you were the CIA’s chief legal officer for seven years. In 2011, you were quoted by Newsweek in an article titled "Inside the Killing Machine." You were quoted describing drone killings as, quote, "murder," and you described the target list as, quote, "basically a hit list." Would you stand by those characterizations now?

JOHNRIZZO: Well, Amy, that interview was a—to be honest about it, was a mistake on my part. I thought I was off the record; the reporter thought we were on the record. So, I said things in that interview that I never wanted or intended to be published. But, you know, the drone program is what it is: It’s a program to target and kill terrorists. And, you know, it is directed and authorized by the president of the United States. I think I—you know, I should not have used the term "murder," but it is definitely a killing program, and it is a—it is a killing machine.

AMYGOODMAN: And the list that the president has, that he takes responsibility, a hit list?

JOHNRIZZO: Well, I mean, again, it was a euphemism, the—again, probably an unpolitic choice of words, but it is—you know, when you get right down to it, it is a list of people who are targeted for lethal action, so one—

AMYGOODMAN: And we do know, from all the information out, thousands of innocent people have been killed. I mean, you look at the NYU-Stanford report, "Living Under Drones," and other information that’s come out. I wanted to ask about this issue of prosecution. Scott Horton, who should be held accountable?

SCOTTHORTON: Well, in the end of the day, of course, John, in his book, talks about the prosecution or the investigations that were undertaken both under President Bush and under President Obama that led to no action and no prosecution. And those investigations started from the bottom. They started with the allegations—they started, actually, with the CIA inspector general’s report and then focused on individual CIA officers. And I think there’s a fundamental problem with the U.S. Department of Justice dealing with these things. And that is that it’s almost impossible to deal with them divorced from the policy choices that was made. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, it’s those who set the policies who bear ultimate responsibility if criminal violations are determined. And here we had the Department of Justice involved in this process of fixing the policies, so it really couldn’t investigate itself. And so I think that’s the dilemma of examination and prosecution. And I think we see, even now, with the Senate Select Committee’s report, that there’s no discussion really of accountability. Philip Giraldi, in the piece he did in The American Conservative, in fact, flags that point. And that’s right. You know, we’ve got a—we have a clear problem there. And—

AMYGOODMAN: Should Bush be prosecuted? Should Rumsfeld? Should Cheney?

SCOTTHORTON: There should be—

AMYGOODMAN: Should President Obama?

SCOTTHORTON: There should be a really independent investigation, which still hasn’t occurred, as far as I’m concerned. And the basis for it has got to be disclosure of much more factual detail that’s still—still not there.

I want to add one other thing, and that is, John said, you know, no CIA operations at Guantánamo. That’s still a huge question. I’ve seen a lot of evidence suggesting the contrary. Certainly we have Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane operations that were going on out there.

AMYGOODMAN: Which were?

SCOTTHORTON: Which were operations geared towards perhaps turning prisoners who were about to be released, turning them into assets. Of course, we have programs like that going on in every single war. You’d be guilty of some failure not to. We’ve got a lot of evidence linking the CIA to those programs.

AMYGOODMAN: John Rizzo, even if you thought you were off the record, you do stand by what you said: You’re talking murder, hit list. Do you think that an administration official should be prosecuted?

JOHNRIZZO: Well, Amy, I mean, I can’t be obviously—I’m somewhat biased in this, since I was one of the senior officials involved in—that took part in the implementation and conception of the program. No, I don’t—look, this is why I want—I support the Senate report coming out. All of the facts should come out. The American people deserve to know what was done in their name and make their own judgments. But at this point, going back now and going back against the individuals, whether they be senior or further on down the chain, I mean, this interrogation—

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we’ll—

JOHNRIZZO: This interrogation—

AMYGOODMAN: We’ll have to leave it there.

JOHNRIZZO: I’m sorry.

AMYGOODMAN: But I want to thank you both for being with us. John Rizzo’s book is called Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, served as the chief legal counsel for the CIA for seven years. And Scott Horton, thanks so much for joining us, human rights attorney, contributing editor at Harper’s magazine.

I’ll be speaking in St. Louis Saturday night, March 29th, celebrating the First Amendment.

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Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0400U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Calls for Release of Info on Bush-Era Kidnappings, Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/25/un_special_rapporteur_on_human_rights
tag:democracynow.org,2013-10-25:en/story/505bd6 AMY GOODMAN : Ben Emmerson, finally, you&#8217;ve called on Britain and the U.S. to release confidential reports into the countries&#8217; involvement in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, accusing them of years of official denials. Can you expand on that?
BEN EMMERSON : Yes, I presented in my last report to the Human Rights Council a series of principles on accountability for what are described in international law as gross or systemic human rights violations. And I think that there&#8217;s no doubt that the conspiracy that involved the commission of acts of secret detention, torture and rendition under the Bush administration constitute gross and systematic human rights violations. And international law is clear on this. There is no superior orders defense. There is no principle that would justify—just as at the Nuremberg trials there was no principle that would allow someone to say, &quot;Well, this is what was ordered by my officials.&quot; There must be—international law requires that there be—a system for achieving accountability.
And we know that the Feinstein Senate committee report into the activities of the CIA is said to be a very thorough and comprehensive analysis and to identify who made the decisions, who committed the acts alleged, and where and how and why. And a crucial part of the duty of accountability under international law is the so-called right to truth. And that&#8217;s a right that&#8217;s not just belonging to the victims, but to society at large. And, therefore, I mean, the time has come, unequivocally, for the release of the Feinstein report. I mean, if there have to be particular redactions in order to protect the identity of operatives from reprisals, so be it. But the key findings of the Feinstein report and of a parallel report commissioned and prepared and provided to the British prime minister in relation to the United Kingdom&#8217;s involvement in these activities must now be made public. And we will not stop calling for the publication of this material until at least a sufficient amount of it has been put into the public domain.
AMY GOODMAN : Ben Emmerson, I want to thank you for being with us, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, has issued an interim report on his investigation into U.S. drone strikes and targeted killings. His findings, along with a report by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, will be debated today at the U.N. General Assembly. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, a drone operator. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: Ben Emmerson, finally, you’ve called on Britain and the U.S. to release confidential reports into the countries’ involvement in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, accusing them of years of official denials. Can you expand on that?

BENEMMERSON: Yes, I presented in my last report to the Human Rights Council a series of principles on accountability for what are described in international law as gross or systemic human rights violations. And I think that there’s no doubt that the conspiracy that involved the commission of acts of secret detention, torture and rendition under the Bush administration constitute gross and systematic human rights violations. And international law is clear on this. There is no superior orders defense. There is no principle that would justify—just as at the Nuremberg trials there was no principle that would allow someone to say, "Well, this is what was ordered by my officials." There must be—international law requires that there be—a system for achieving accountability.

And we know that the Feinstein Senate committee report into the activities of the CIA is said to be a very thorough and comprehensive analysis and to identify who made the decisions, who committed the acts alleged, and where and how and why. And a crucial part of the duty of accountability under international law is the so-called right to truth. And that’s a right that’s not just belonging to the victims, but to society at large. And, therefore, I mean, the time has come, unequivocally, for the release of the Feinstein report. I mean, if there have to be particular redactions in order to protect the identity of operatives from reprisals, so be it. But the key findings of the Feinstein report and of a parallel report commissioned and prepared and provided to the British prime minister in relation to the United Kingdom’s involvement in these activities must now be made public. And we will not stop calling for the publication of this material until at least a sufficient amount of it has been put into the public domain.

AMYGOODMAN: Ben Emmerson, I want to thank you for being with us, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, has issued an interim report on his investigation into U.S. drone strikes and targeted killings. His findings, along with a report by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, will be debated today at the U.N. General Assembly. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, a drone operator. Stay with us.

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Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400Globalizing Torture: Ahead of Brennan Hearing, International Complicity in CIA Rendition Exposedhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/7/globalizing_torture_ahead_of_brennan_hearing
tag:democracynow.org,2013-02-07:en/story/6fb3a6 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama&#8217;s nominee to the CIA , John Brennan, is heading to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing. Obama&#8217;s counterrorism czar is expected to be grilled on the administration&#8217;s secret drone program and the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas. On Wednesday, the Obama administration agreed to show two congressional panels the stated legal rationale for the assassinations after Democratic Senator Ron Wyden suggested he would consider filibustering Brennan&#8217;s nomination. Brennan will also likely be asked about his time at the CIA during George W. Bush&#8217;s administration.
Four years ago, Brennan was a rumored pick for the CIA job when Obama was first elected, but he was forced to withdraw from consideration amid protests over his public support for the CIA&#8217;s policies of so-called &quot;enhanced interrogation techniques&quot; and extraordinary rendition program. In 2005, Brennan said on PBS that he was, quote, &quot;intimately familiar&quot; with cases of rendition and that he considered the practice &quot;an absolutely vital tool&quot; in combating terrorism. This is Margaret Warner on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer interviewing John Brennan.
MARGARET WARNER : So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?
JOHN BRENNAN : I think it&#8217;s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. government has been involved in, and I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.
MARGARET WARNER : So is it—are you saying, both—in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?
JOHN BRENNAN : Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And U.S. government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.
MARGARET WARNER : Why would you not, if this—if you have a suspect who&#8217;s a danger to the United States, keep it—keep him in the United States&#8217; custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?
JOHN BRENNAN : No, I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s it at all. Also, I think it&#8217;s rather arrogant to think that we&#8217;re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let&#8217;s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they&#8217;re an Egyptian citizen. And Egyptians then have a longer history in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was John Brennan speaking to PBS&#8217;s Margaret Warner in 2005.
Brennan&#8217;s confirmation hearing comes as new information is coming to light about the extent of the secret rendition program after the 9/11 attacks. A new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative names at least 136 individuals who were allegedly subjected to secret detention and rendition.
AMY GOODMAN : The report is called &quot;Globalizing Torture.&quot; It also identifies 54 foreign governments that aided the United States in these operations. The countries include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
One country that&#8217;s not listed is India, but the report is making headlines there, too, because, for more, we&#8217;re joined now by the report&#8217;s author, Amrit Singh. She&#8217;s senior legal officer at the National Security and Counterterrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative. The full name of her new report is &quot;Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.&quot; She&#8217;s co-author with Jameel Jaffer of the book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond_. And interestingly, the new torture report has become news in India. The human-rights-secret-detention-amrit-singh&quot;&gt;headline in The Times of India reads, quote: &quot;Prime Minister&#8217;s Daughter Blows Whistle on 54 Nations that Helped U.S. Detention Programme.&quot; Another website headline, their story: &quot;PM&#8217;s Daughter Takes on CIA over Torture.&quot; That&#8217;s right, our guest, Amrit Singh, is the daughter of India&#8217;s prime minister, Manmohan Singh.
Amrit Singh, welcome to Democracy Now!
AMRIT SINGH : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s talk about John Brennan first. He goes to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing. You wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times . What do you think he should be asked? What do you think of the nomination of John Brennan to be head of the CIA ?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I think John Brennan should be asked what he meant when he said that he was intimately familiar with cases of rendition and that rendition is an absolutely vital tool in combating terrorism, because by the time Brennan made that statement in December of 2005, a number of people had been rendered to foreign governments where they were tortured. By December of 2005, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery had been rendered to Egypt and subjected to electric shock. By December of 2005, Maher Arar, a Canadian national, had been rendered to Syria and subjected to being locked up in a tiny grave-like cell and beaten with cables. By December 2005, a number of other individuals, including Khalid El-Masri, had been rendered. Khalid El-Masri was captured and kidnapped in Macedonia and transferred to Afghanistan and abused. A recent court decision by the European Court of Human Rights found that Khalid El-Masri&#8217;s treatment by the CIA amounted to torture. So I think that John Brennan has a lot of explaining to do as to what exactly he meant.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Brennan also said in that clip that the government sought assurances from the other countries to which these individuals were rendered that human rights would be respected. But you, in your report, clearly indicate that mere blanket assurances are insufficient to be able to deal with the—obviously, with the kind of abuse that occurred here.
AMRIT SINGH : That&#8217;s correct. Maher Arar was transferred to Syria after assurances were obtained from Syria not to torture him, but he was tortured nonetheless. Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery were transferred from Sweden to Egypt with assurances from Egypt not to torture him, but they were tortured. They were subjected to electric shocks. So, I think that the—there&#8217;s a wealth of information in the public domain that shows that these diplomatic assurances in fact don&#8217;t work. High-level Bush administration officials themselves acknowledged that there&#8217;s only so much you can do once a prisoner is out of your custody. So, the onus really is on the Obama administration to explain what is its policy and how is it going to work.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you think of John Brennan as the—as President Obama&#8217;s nominee?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I think he has many questions to answer. I think that rendition is obviously, as documented in this report, the source of grave human rights violations. It damaged the United States&#8217;s reputation around the world. It coopted as many as 54 governments into a torture program. It was flagrantly illegal. And I think it really requires a serious examination by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to go to another clip of John Brennan in 2006 when he appeared on PBS&#8217;s Frontline and was questioned about the Bush administration&#8217;s counterterrorism policies.
JOHN BRENNAN : The war, or the campaign against terrorism, is going to be a long one, and that the opposition, whether it be al-Qaeda or whether it be Iraq, doesn&#8217;t play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, and therefore, you know, the U.S., in some areas, has to take off the gloves. And I think that&#8217;s entirely appropriate. I think we do have to take off the gloves in some areas, but within bounds, and at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason, and with full understanding of what the consequences of that might be.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This issue of John Brennan saying the U.S. has to take off the gloves, given the necessity of the fight against the war on terrorism, your response?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I think that that was a sentiment that was echoed across the Bush administration. The report opens with a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney saying that we have to go to the dark side, and was repeated by a number of counterterrorism officials in the Bush administration. Well, I think that that is—the fact that this report documents as many as 136 cases of human rights violations, including torture, demonstrates what that paradigm led to. It was a paradigm that essentially ignored longstanding prohibitions against torture, that violated not only international but also domestic law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I&#8217;m interested—your report, in the 54 countries that you mention, mentions some countries that most Americans are not aware are cooperating in the—Zimbabwe and Iran. The particular case of Iran&#8217;s involvement in some of these renditions, could you talk about that?
AMRIT SINGH : Yes, it&#8217;s interesting. There are a number of individuals who were captured in Iran who were then handed over to Afghan authorities as part of a prisoner exchange, that then—but the Iranians must have known at the time that the—that the Afghans would hand them over to the U.S. because of the ongoing hostilities in Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN : So, summarize the findings in your report. It&#8217;s extremely extensive. And what surprised you most as you did this research, Amrit?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I think, at a very basic level, just the—the horrific kinds of abuse that was meted out by the United States and its partners to the human beings who were subjected to these operations, that of course stands out, but also just the scale and sweep of these operations, the number of people who were put through this and the number of governments that were coopted. And I think that, of course, the U.S. was a ringleader. This was—this was the CIA&#8217;s invention. But moral responsibility does not rest with the United States alone; it rests also with those 54 governments that were complicit in various ways.
But I should also add that the—you know, the U.S.—leaving aside the damage to its moral reputation, the U.S. also exposed itself to liability and censure worldwide, because we&#8217;re now increasingly seeing foreign courts pass judgment against the United States, as in the case of Khalid El-Masri. The European Court of Human Rights essentially found that the CIA&#8217;s treatment of him amounted to torture.
AMY GOODMAN : And just very quickly, explain his story, for people who don&#8217;t know. This was an innocent guy on a bus, a case of mistaken identity?
AMRIT SINGH : That&#8217;s correct. So Khalid El-Masri was essentially traveling on vacation in Macedonia in December of 2003, and he was abducted by Macedonian officials acting at the direction of the CIA in Macedonia, locked up, secretly detained for 23 days in Macedonian custody, and then transferred to the CIA at Skopje Airport in Macedonia. And then the CIA flew him to Afghanistan and held him for four months in further secret detention, did not permit him access to counsel or his family or a German counselor.
AMY GOODMAN : He says he was injected. He—
AMRIT SINGH : Right. He was sodomized at the airport. He was beaten. He was stripped naked, and he was subjected to a range of sexual humiliation and abuse, and ultimately, after four months, was released, without explanation, without apology, in a roadside in Albania and was sort of left to make his way home back to Germany. Khalid El-Masri has not received any kind of acknowledgment from the United States government, no apology and no compensation.
AMY GOODMAN : Very early on, Condoleezza Rice understood this was a case of mistaken identity, but they continued to hold him because what would they do with him when he got out and told what happened to him?
AMRIT SINGH : Exactly.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times , you raise the point that many of the—or, all of these people who were subjected to this kind of treatment, none of them has gotten any kind of compensation, acknowledgment from the U.S. government, nor has the government sought to prosecute any of the officials that were involved or knowledgeable about the crimes that were committed here in terms of the attacks or the abuse of these folks.
AMRIT SINGH : That&#8217;s correct. There has been virtually no accountability in the United States for these abuses. A Justice Department investigation into abuses only looked at abuses that exceeded the abuse that its own Office of Legal Counsel had authorized. And we know from the Office of Legal Counsel memos released in August of 2009 by President Obama&#8217;s administration that there was a range of horrific abuse that was specifically authorized by the Bush administration. But none of those officials have been held accountable to date.
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you very much, Amrit, for joining us. And I wanted to ask, finally, on that list, very extensive list of 54 countries, India was not on the list.
AMRIT SINGH : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : Were you surprised by this?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I mean, I—I&#8217;m a researcher, I&#8217;m a lawyer. I tell the truth. And I documented what I found. So, I represented what the facts were. It&#8217;s not my—I didn&#8217;t—you know, I did the best I could.
AMY GOODMAN : Of course, there were—what&#8217;s amazing is we&#8217;re talking about almost a third of the countries in the world that were involved.
AMRIT SINGH : That&#8217;s right, a quarter of the countries in the world. The State Department recognizes 195. Fifty-four is more than a quarter of that, yes.
AMY GOODMAN : And in terms of that, these countries that have been involved, that you talk about being coopted, what were the deals that were made? And have countries come forth to say what they did?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I think that we don&#8217;t know all of the facts with respect to each government, but we do know that there were a number of bilateral agreements that were signed, and there was also a NATO framework within many of—within which many of these agreements were executed. We know, for example, in Poland there have been reports of an agreement that was arrived at between the Polish authorities and the United States. Now, the—apparently, there was actually a document in Poland that bore the signature of the Polish official but not the American official. The Americans might have been more careful in not committing their signatures to writing. But nonetheless, these were very secret operations that could not have been implemented without very high-level authorizations from top officials in all of these governments.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And have any of the governments sought to come clean and to hold their officials responsible for what maybe a prior administration in that country did?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, it&#8217;s interesting that Canada has apologized to Maher Arar for its involvement in his extraordinary rendition to Syria. Canada supplied faulty intelligence to the United States that led to the rendition of Arar to Syria. But there—by and large, most governments have not owned up to the truth. And there is evidence in the public domain to suggest that the United States has exerted diplomatic pressure on a lot of governments not to disclose information about this highly classified operation.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you think there should be war crimes trials in this country?
AMRIT SINGH : Well, I think that there needs to be some measure of accountability. I mean, there has been virtually none. And that&#8217;s something that cannot stand. Not only must officials be held accountable, but there needs to be further disclosure about the extent of these operations, the victims. There needs to be acknowledgement by the United States. And it&#8217;s—if Canada can apologize and compensate Maher Arar, why is it that the United States, which was the principal ringleader in all of these operations, cannot issue a similar apology, not only to Maher Arar, but a number of other victims like Khalid El-Masri who were wrongfully abducted and tortured?
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you for being with us, Amrit Singh, senior legal officer at the National Security and Counterterrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative. The new report is called &quot;Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.&quot; And we&#8217;ll link to it at democracynow.org. This Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. We&#8217;ll be back in a minute. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama’s nominee to the CIA, John Brennan, is heading to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing. Obama’s counterrorism czar is expected to be grilled on the administration’s secret drone program and the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas. On Wednesday, the Obama administration agreed to show two congressional panels the stated legal rationale for the assassinations after Democratic Senator Ron Wyden suggested he would consider filibustering Brennan’s nomination. Brennan will also likely be asked about his time at the CIA during George W. Bush’s administration.

Four years ago, Brennan was a rumored pick for the CIA job when Obama was first elected, but he was forced to withdraw from consideration amid protests over his public support for the CIA’s policies of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and extraordinary rendition program. In 2005, Brennan said on PBS that he was, quote, "intimately familiar" with cases of rendition and that he considered the practice "an absolutely vital tool" in combating terrorism. This is Margaret Warner on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer interviewing John Brennan.

MARGARETWARNER: So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHNBRENNAN: I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. government has been involved in, and I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARETWARNER: So is it—are you saying, both—in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHNBRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And U.S. government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.

MARGARETWARNER: Why would you not, if this—if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep it—keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?

JOHNBRENNAN: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we’re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen. And Egyptians then have a longer history in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was John Brennan speaking to PBS’s Margaret Warner in 2005.

Brennan’s confirmation hearing comes as new information is coming to light about the extent of the secret rendition program after the 9/11 attacks. A new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative names at least 136 individuals who were allegedly subjected to secret detention and rendition.

One country that’s not listed is India, but the report is making headlines there, too, because, for more, we’re joined now by the report’s author, Amrit Singh. She’s senior legal officer at the National Security and Counterterrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative. The full name of her new report is "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition." She’s co-author with Jameel Jaffer of the book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond_. And interestingly, the new torture report has become news in India. The human-rights-secret-detention-amrit-singh">headline in The Times of India reads, quote: "Prime Minister’s Daughter Blows Whistle on 54 Nations that Helped U.S. Detention Programme." Another website headline, their story: "PM’s Daughter Takes on CIA over Torture." That’s right, our guest, Amrit Singh, is the daughter of India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

Amrit Singh, welcome to Democracy Now!

AMRITSINGH: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s talk about John Brennan first. He goes to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing. You wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times. What do you think he should be asked? What do you think of the nomination of John Brennan to be head of the CIA?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I think John Brennan should be asked what he meant when he said that he was intimately familiar with cases of rendition and that rendition is an absolutely vital tool in combating terrorism, because by the time Brennan made that statement in December of 2005, a number of people had been rendered to foreign governments where they were tortured. By December of 2005, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery had been rendered to Egypt and subjected to electric shock. By December of 2005, Maher Arar, a Canadian national, had been rendered to Syria and subjected to being locked up in a tiny grave-like cell and beaten with cables. By December 2005, a number of other individuals, including Khalid El-Masri, had been rendered. Khalid El-Masri was captured and kidnapped in Macedonia and transferred to Afghanistan and abused. A recent court decision by the European Court of Human Rights found that Khalid El-Masri’s treatment by the CIA amounted to torture. So I think that John Brennan has a lot of explaining to do as to what exactly he meant.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Brennan also said in that clip that the government sought assurances from the other countries to which these individuals were rendered that human rights would be respected. But you, in your report, clearly indicate that mere blanket assurances are insufficient to be able to deal with the—obviously, with the kind of abuse that occurred here.

AMRITSINGH: That’s correct. Maher Arar was transferred to Syria after assurances were obtained from Syria not to torture him, but he was tortured nonetheless. Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery were transferred from Sweden to Egypt with assurances from Egypt not to torture him, but they were tortured. They were subjected to electric shocks. So, I think that the—there’s a wealth of information in the public domain that shows that these diplomatic assurances in fact don’t work. High-level Bush administration officials themselves acknowledged that there’s only so much you can do once a prisoner is out of your custody. So, the onus really is on the Obama administration to explain what is its policy and how is it going to work.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you think of John Brennan as the—as President Obama’s nominee?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I think he has many questions to answer. I think that rendition is obviously, as documented in this report, the source of grave human rights violations. It damaged the United States’s reputation around the world. It coopted as many as 54 governments into a torture program. It was flagrantly illegal. And I think it really requires a serious examination by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to go to another clip of John Brennan in 2006 when he appeared on PBS’s Frontline and was questioned about the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies.

JOHNBRENNAN: The war, or the campaign against terrorism, is going to be a long one, and that the opposition, whether it be al-Qaeda or whether it be Iraq, doesn’t play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, and therefore, you know, the U.S., in some areas, has to take off the gloves. And I think that’s entirely appropriate. I think we do have to take off the gloves in some areas, but within bounds, and at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason, and with full understanding of what the consequences of that might be.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This issue of John Brennan saying the U.S. has to take off the gloves, given the necessity of the fight against the war on terrorism, your response?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I think that that was a sentiment that was echoed across the Bush administration. The report opens with a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney saying that we have to go to the dark side, and was repeated by a number of counterterrorism officials in the Bush administration. Well, I think that that is—the fact that this report documents as many as 136 cases of human rights violations, including torture, demonstrates what that paradigm led to. It was a paradigm that essentially ignored longstanding prohibitions against torture, that violated not only international but also domestic law.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m interested—your report, in the 54 countries that you mention, mentions some countries that most Americans are not aware are cooperating in the—Zimbabwe and Iran. The particular case of Iran’s involvement in some of these renditions, could you talk about that?

AMRITSINGH: Yes, it’s interesting. There are a number of individuals who were captured in Iran who were then handed over to Afghan authorities as part of a prisoner exchange, that then—but the Iranians must have known at the time that the—that the Afghans would hand them over to the U.S. because of the ongoing hostilities in Afghanistan.

AMYGOODMAN: So, summarize the findings in your report. It’s extremely extensive. And what surprised you most as you did this research, Amrit?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I think, at a very basic level, just the—the horrific kinds of abuse that was meted out by the United States and its partners to the human beings who were subjected to these operations, that of course stands out, but also just the scale and sweep of these operations, the number of people who were put through this and the number of governments that were coopted. And I think that, of course, the U.S. was a ringleader. This was—this was the CIA’s invention. But moral responsibility does not rest with the United States alone; it rests also with those 54 governments that were complicit in various ways.

But I should also add that the—you know, the U.S.—leaving aside the damage to its moral reputation, the U.S. also exposed itself to liability and censure worldwide, because we’re now increasingly seeing foreign courts pass judgment against the United States, as in the case of Khalid El-Masri. The European Court of Human Rights essentially found that the CIA’s treatment of him amounted to torture.

AMYGOODMAN: And just very quickly, explain his story, for people who don’t know. This was an innocent guy on a bus, a case of mistaken identity?

AMRITSINGH: That’s correct. So Khalid El-Masri was essentially traveling on vacation in Macedonia in December of 2003, and he was abducted by Macedonian officials acting at the direction of the CIA in Macedonia, locked up, secretly detained for 23 days in Macedonian custody, and then transferred to the CIA at Skopje Airport in Macedonia. And then the CIA flew him to Afghanistan and held him for four months in further secret detention, did not permit him access to counsel or his family or a German counselor.

AMYGOODMAN: He says he was injected. He—

AMRITSINGH: Right. He was sodomized at the airport. He was beaten. He was stripped naked, and he was subjected to a range of sexual humiliation and abuse, and ultimately, after four months, was released, without explanation, without apology, in a roadside in Albania and was sort of left to make his way home back to Germany. Khalid El-Masri has not received any kind of acknowledgment from the United States government, no apology and no compensation.

AMYGOODMAN: Very early on, Condoleezza Rice understood this was a case of mistaken identity, but they continued to hold him because what would they do with him when he got out and told what happened to him?

AMRITSINGH: Exactly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times, you raise the point that many of the—or, all of these people who were subjected to this kind of treatment, none of them has gotten any kind of compensation, acknowledgment from the U.S. government, nor has the government sought to prosecute any of the officials that were involved or knowledgeable about the crimes that were committed here in terms of the attacks or the abuse of these folks.

AMRITSINGH: That’s correct. There has been virtually no accountability in the United States for these abuses. A Justice Department investigation into abuses only looked at abuses that exceeded the abuse that its own Office of Legal Counsel had authorized. And we know from the Office of Legal Counsel memos released in August of 2009 by President Obama’s administration that there was a range of horrific abuse that was specifically authorized by the Bush administration. But none of those officials have been held accountable to date.

AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Amrit, for joining us. And I wanted to ask, finally, on that list, very extensive list of 54 countries, India was not on the list.

AMRITSINGH: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: Were you surprised by this?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I mean, I—I’m a researcher, I’m a lawyer. I tell the truth. And I documented what I found. So, I represented what the facts were. It’s not my—I didn’t—you know, I did the best I could.

AMYGOODMAN: Of course, there were—what’s amazing is we’re talking about almost a third of the countries in the world that were involved.

AMRITSINGH: That’s right, a quarter of the countries in the world. The State Department recognizes 195. Fifty-four is more than a quarter of that, yes.

AMYGOODMAN: And in terms of that, these countries that have been involved, that you talk about being coopted, what were the deals that were made? And have countries come forth to say what they did?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I think that we don’t know all of the facts with respect to each government, but we do know that there were a number of bilateral agreements that were signed, and there was also a NATO framework within many of—within which many of these agreements were executed. We know, for example, in Poland there have been reports of an agreement that was arrived at between the Polish authorities and the United States. Now, the—apparently, there was actually a document in Poland that bore the signature of the Polish official but not the American official. The Americans might have been more careful in not committing their signatures to writing. But nonetheless, these were very secret operations that could not have been implemented without very high-level authorizations from top officials in all of these governments.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And have any of the governments sought to come clean and to hold their officials responsible for what maybe a prior administration in that country did?

AMRITSINGH: Well, it’s interesting that Canada has apologized to Maher Arar for its involvement in his extraordinary rendition to Syria. Canada supplied faulty intelligence to the United States that led to the rendition of Arar to Syria. But there—by and large, most governments have not owned up to the truth. And there is evidence in the public domain to suggest that the United States has exerted diplomatic pressure on a lot of governments not to disclose information about this highly classified operation.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you think there should be war crimes trials in this country?

AMRITSINGH: Well, I think that there needs to be some measure of accountability. I mean, there has been virtually none. And that’s something that cannot stand. Not only must officials be held accountable, but there needs to be further disclosure about the extent of these operations, the victims. There needs to be acknowledgement by the United States. And it’s—if Canada can apologize and compensate Maher Arar, why is it that the United States, which was the principal ringleader in all of these operations, cannot issue a similar apology, not only to Maher Arar, but a number of other victims like Khalid El-Masri who were wrongfully abducted and tortured?

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Amrit Singh, senior legal officer at the National Security and Counterterrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative. The new report is called "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition." And we’ll link to it at democracynow.org. This Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll be back in a minute.

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Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500As Brennan Tapped for CIA, Case of Somali Detainees Highlights Obama's Embrace of Secret Renditionshttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/9/as_brennan_tapped_for_cia_case
tag:democracynow.org,2013-01-09:en/story/e72c71 NERMEEN SHAIKH : We turn now to look at the use of torture and rendition techniques under the Obama administration in light of this week&#8217;s nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA . Brennan, who is currently Obama&#8217;s top counterterrorism adviser, withdrew from consideration for the same position in 2008 amidst protests over his role at the agency under George W. Bush. Brennan had publicly supported the CIA&#8217;s policies of so-called &quot;enhanced interrogation techniques&quot; and extraordinary rendition.
Brennan&#8217;s nomination comes as new details have emerged about a rendition story that has received little news attention. On the Friday before the Christmas long weekend, three European men of Somali descent appeared briefly in a New York courtroom. Two of them were from Sweden—Ali Yasin Ahmed and Mohamed Yusuf; the third man, Mahdi Hashi, was a longtime resident of Britain. Their whereabouts had been unknown for months. According to The Washington Post , the men were arrested in the East African country of Djibouti on a, quote, &quot;murky pretext&quot; in August. They were then questioned by U.S. interrogators before being secretly indicted by a U.S. grand jury and flown to the United States for trial.
AMY GOODMAN : The men are accused of supporting the al-Shabab militia, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group despite admissions by U.S. officials that most fighters are not terrorists but simply fighters in Somalia&#8217;s civil war. Their appearance in a U.S. court offered new evidence about how President Obama has quietly continued the controversial practice known as rendition.
To talk more about the significance of this case, we&#8217;re joined by two guests. Ephraim Savitt is a lawyer representing Mohamed Yusuf, one of the three accused men. And joining us via Democracy Now! videostream is Clara Gutteridge, the human rights investigator and director of the Equal Justice Forum.
Let&#8217;s start with you, Clara. Talk about the significance of these three men, who they are, ending up in a New York court over the holidays.
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : I think what these cases really show, above everything else, is that rendition is alive and kicking under the Obama administration. Over the past few years, there&#8217;s been an increasing focus on Obama&#8217;s use of targeted killing and the drone program, and we in the human rights community had really forgotten about rendition and secret detention. But what we can see from these cases is that—is that secret detention and rendition are absolutely ongoing, and it&#8217;s something that we really need to focus on.
AMY GOODMAN : Who are they? Tell us who these three men are.
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : I mean, in terms of describing who the men are, I think it&#8217;s far better for the lawyer to do that. But to my knowledge, these men were being detained incommunicado in Djibouti for several months without any access to lawyers or to any kind of due process. And when there started to be some media focus on the fact of their disappearance and detention, what then happened was that they were whisked to the United States. They were rendered there with no judicial oversight and brought before a court in the middle of the holiday, which, in terms of timing, is quite suspicious because it looks as though it was done, sort of—to sort of—to increase the kind of—keep them under the radar, if you like.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Clara Gutteridge, can you talk about the significance of them having been picked up in Djibouti, which is a long-term close ally of Washington and home to Camp Lemonnier, a key U.S. military base in Africa and also the hub of counterterrorism operations there and drone attacks?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right, Djibouti hosts a major U.S. military base called Camp Lemonnier, which is the headquarters of Operation Enduring Horn of—Operation Enduring Freedom&ndash;Horn of Africa and AFRICOM , which is the U.S. Africa Command. It has long been associated with renditions and secret detentions, going back to at least 2002. And over the past few years, it has very, very quietly become the largest hub of U.S. drone operations outside Afghanistan, so it&#8217;s really a key location for the United States in its war on terror both in Africa and Yemen, because of course it&#8217;s just across the water from Yemen.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Ephraim Savitt, can you tell us a little about your client, Mohamed Yusuf, how you came across the case, what you know about how he&#8217;s been treated since he&#8217;s been in U.S. custody?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : Good morning.
I came across the case because I was appointed by the court in the Eastern District of New York to represent this particular defendant. And his co-defendants, the two other detainees, also received lawyers that were appointed by the court. At present, now that we&#8217;re under the court&#8217;s jurisdiction, he is being treated humanely, he&#8217;s being treated well. But that was not always the case. In fact, he was arrested, together with his two co-defendants and others in Djibouti, by Djibouti authorities. And they were not treated with kid gloves—let&#8217;s put it that way—initially. And at some point, American authorities got involved in interrogating these three men. So, things got better for them now that we&#8217;re no longer under the radar.
AMY GOODMAN : Tell us who Mohamed Yusuf is, your client.
EPHRAIM SAVITT : Mohamed Yusuf is a young man. He&#8217;s approximately 27, 28 years old. He&#8217;s of Somali descent. He comes from Sweden. He was a bus driver in Sweden at one point. And he comes from a very close-knit and supportive family. And Mohamed was one of the many people who were recruited, through websites, advertisements, as well as other approaches, to join the al-Shabab movement, as a revolutionary group, against what they considered the oppression of other African invaders in their country.
AMY GOODMAN : They were fighting AFRICOM , the African troops?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : There were fighting the African troops. It is a religious-based organization. Mohamed joined the organization.
AMY GOODMAN : Why does the U.S. consider it a terrorist organization?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : Well, the U.S. considers it a terrorist organization, as I understand it, because they are aligned with al-Qaeda. And they allegedly were involved in the bombing in Uganda in a soccer stadium that killed a number of Ugandans as well as foreigners, as well, as I understand it, some Americans. Also—
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re saying your client was or the group was?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : My client was not involved in anything having to do with terrorism. The group, according to reports, was involved in terrorism. There are some other reports that they put a price on the president&#8217;s head based on a number of sheep and a number of camels, which seems a little odd, but it doesn&#8217;t seem like a very serious threat. My client was a combatant in Somalia, in southern Somalia, and so were his co-defendants. And they were involved in military operations. There is no allegation, either officially or even unofficially, as I understand it, in my discussion with prosecutors, that they were in any way involved in targeting, and certainly or attacking American interests or American personnel.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : So, a couple of things: First, you said that your client, Mohamed Yusuf, was not treated with kid gloves.
EPHRAIM SAVITT : Correct.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : What kind of treatment precisely was he subjected to, number one? And number two, given what you&#8217;ve said, why is your client being tried in a U.S. court?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : All right. Well, the first question is easier to answer. Mohamed was, as he put it, slapped around by Djibouti authorities. They threatened to use electrodes if he didn&#8217;t start talking. He heard the shrieks and the screams of others from other rooms. It was very clear to him that—
AMY GOODMAN : And where was he being held then?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : He was being held in a Djibouti prison.
AMY GOODMAN : By?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : By Djibouti authorities. He was arrested, together with his co-defendants, in an apartment in Djibouti. There were no Americans involved in that initial rough treatment. He made certain statements to the Djibouti authorities. And after that point, agents of the FBI , agents of other agencies, who did not identify themselves very clearly, did interrogate him. But they did so gently. On the other hand, the Djibouti people who slapped him around were seated in the same room with their arms crossed against their chests. So it was quite clear that these Djibouti police were proxies for the American authorities.
AMY GOODMAN : When was he held there? When did his family lose contact with him?
EPHRAIM SAVITT : His family actually lost contact with him sometime in 2008 when he was recruited to join the al-Shabab insurrection in Somalia. He was arrested sometime in the beginning of August this past summer. He was held incommunicado. Nobody knew about his existence until mid-November, when he was brought into the Eastern District of New York, and I and my fellow counsel, Harry Batchelder and Susan Kellman, were appointed to represent the three defendants.
You asked the question as to why he&#8217;s being prosecuted in a Brooklyn federal courthouse, and that&#8217;s an excellent question. I don&#8217;t have a good answer for that. These are folks who were involved, for better or for worse, in a military campaign in eastern Africa. Now they&#8217;ve become criminal defendants in the Eastern District of New York. Their first and only contact with the Eastern District or with the United States is when they were brought here in chains and under an accusation of being terrorists. They never targeted civilians. They never hurt civilians. I don&#8217;t even know if they were able to hurt any of the enemy soldiers. They have no idea about that. But they were combatants, that&#8217;s true.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Clara Gutteridge, before we conclude, can you talk about the significance of John Brennan&#8217;s nomination as CIA chief? This is someone in 2005 who said that renditions were an absolutely vital tool of U.S. intelligence.
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Thanks. It&#8217;s extremely worrying to me that John Brennan is going to be the CIA chief, and the reason is this. As Obama&#8217;s chief counterterrorism adviser, he has in many ways been the architect of the drone program as we know it. He&#8217;s also been responsible for something possibly even more sinister, which is—which will probably be Obama&#8217;s legacy with respect to the war on terror. And that is that what was previously a set of ad hoc practices that were, you know, arguably developed in the heat of the moment after 9/11, in the months and years following that, under Obama have become systematized and bureaucratized. And what we have with these systems that Obama and Brennan have marshaled through is a kind of concretization of this idea that the United States is perpetually and indefinitely at war. And everything that we&#8217;re seeing with these renditions and secret detentions and drone attacks is something that flows from that. So, whilst the United States perceives itself to be perpetually at war, these kinds of activities will go on. People, like these three defendants, will be regarded as being within the jurisdiction of the United States and being the enemies of the United States. There will be no space for reparations for people that have been wronged, that have been tortured, that have been wrongfully rendered.
AMY GOODMAN : Clara Gutteridge, we&#8217;re going to have to leave it at that, director of Equal Justice Forum, and Ephraim Savitt, lawyer representing Mohamed Yusuf. We want to thank you both for being with us. NERMEENSHAIKH: We turn now to look at the use of torture and rendition techniques under the Obama administration in light of this week’s nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA. Brennan, who is currently Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, withdrew from consideration for the same position in 2008 amidst protests over his role at the agency under George W. Bush. Brennan had publicly supported the CIA’s policies of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and extraordinary rendition.

Brennan’s nomination comes as new details have emerged about a rendition story that has received little news attention. On the Friday before the Christmas long weekend, three European men of Somali descent appeared briefly in a New York courtroom. Two of them were from Sweden—Ali Yasin Ahmed and Mohamed Yusuf; the third man, Mahdi Hashi, was a longtime resident of Britain. Their whereabouts had been unknown for months. According to The Washington Post, the men were arrested in the East African country of Djibouti on a, quote, "murky pretext" in August. They were then questioned by U.S. interrogators before being secretly indicted by a U.S. grand jury and flown to the United States for trial.

AMYGOODMAN: The men are accused of supporting the al-Shabab militia, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group despite admissions by U.S. officials that most fighters are not terrorists but simply fighters in Somalia’s civil war. Their appearance in a U.S. court offered new evidence about how President Obama has quietly continued the controversial practice known as rendition.

To talk more about the significance of this case, we’re joined by two guests. Ephraim Savitt is a lawyer representing Mohamed Yusuf, one of the three accused men. And joining us via Democracy Now! videostream is Clara Gutteridge, the human rights investigator and director of the Equal Justice Forum.

Let’s start with you, Clara. Talk about the significance of these three men, who they are, ending up in a New York court over the holidays.

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: I think what these cases really show, above everything else, is that rendition is alive and kicking under the Obama administration. Over the past few years, there’s been an increasing focus on Obama’s use of targeted killing and the drone program, and we in the human rights community had really forgotten about rendition and secret detention. But what we can see from these cases is that—is that secret detention and rendition are absolutely ongoing, and it’s something that we really need to focus on.

AMYGOODMAN: Who are they? Tell us who these three men are.

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: I mean, in terms of describing who the men are, I think it’s far better for the lawyer to do that. But to my knowledge, these men were being detained incommunicado in Djibouti for several months without any access to lawyers or to any kind of due process. And when there started to be some media focus on the fact of their disappearance and detention, what then happened was that they were whisked to the United States. They were rendered there with no judicial oversight and brought before a court in the middle of the holiday, which, in terms of timing, is quite suspicious because it looks as though it was done, sort of—to sort of—to increase the kind of—keep them under the radar, if you like.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Clara Gutteridge, can you talk about the significance of them having been picked up in Djibouti, which is a long-term close ally of Washington and home to Camp Lemonnier, a key U.S. military base in Africa and also the hub of counterterrorism operations there and drone attacks?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right, Djibouti hosts a major U.S. military base called Camp Lemonnier, which is the headquarters of Operation Enduring Horn of—Operation Enduring Freedom–Horn of Africa and AFRICOM, which is the U.S. Africa Command. It has long been associated with renditions and secret detentions, going back to at least 2002. And over the past few years, it has very, very quietly become the largest hub of U.S. drone operations outside Afghanistan, so it’s really a key location for the United States in its war on terror both in Africa and Yemen, because of course it’s just across the water from Yemen.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Ephraim Savitt, can you tell us a little about your client, Mohamed Yusuf, how you came across the case, what you know about how he’s been treated since he’s been in U.S. custody?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: Good morning.

I came across the case because I was appointed by the court in the Eastern District of New York to represent this particular defendant. And his co-defendants, the two other detainees, also received lawyers that were appointed by the court. At present, now that we’re under the court’s jurisdiction, he is being treated humanely, he’s being treated well. But that was not always the case. In fact, he was arrested, together with his two co-defendants and others in Djibouti, by Djibouti authorities. And they were not treated with kid gloves—let’s put it that way—initially. And at some point, American authorities got involved in interrogating these three men. So, things got better for them now that we’re no longer under the radar.

AMYGOODMAN: Tell us who Mohamed Yusuf is, your client.

EPHRAIMSAVITT: Mohamed Yusuf is a young man. He’s approximately 27, 28 years old. He’s of Somali descent. He comes from Sweden. He was a bus driver in Sweden at one point. And he comes from a very close-knit and supportive family. And Mohamed was one of the many people who were recruited, through websites, advertisements, as well as other approaches, to join the al-Shabab movement, as a revolutionary group, against what they considered the oppression of other African invaders in their country.

AMYGOODMAN: They were fighting AFRICOM, the African troops?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: There were fighting the African troops. It is a religious-based organization. Mohamed joined the organization.

AMYGOODMAN: Why does the U.S. consider it a terrorist organization?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: Well, the U.S. considers it a terrorist organization, as I understand it, because they are aligned with al-Qaeda. And they allegedly were involved in the bombing in Uganda in a soccer stadium that killed a number of Ugandans as well as foreigners, as well, as I understand it, some Americans. Also—

AMYGOODMAN: You’re saying your client was or the group was?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: My client was not involved in anything having to do with terrorism. The group, according to reports, was involved in terrorism. There are some other reports that they put a price on the president’s head based on a number of sheep and a number of camels, which seems a little odd, but it doesn’t seem like a very serious threat. My client was a combatant in Somalia, in southern Somalia, and so were his co-defendants. And they were involved in military operations. There is no allegation, either officially or even unofficially, as I understand it, in my discussion with prosecutors, that they were in any way involved in targeting, and certainly or attacking American interests or American personnel.

NERMEENSHAIKH: So, a couple of things: First, you said that your client, Mohamed Yusuf, was not treated with kid gloves.

EPHRAIMSAVITT: Correct.

NERMEENSHAIKH: What kind of treatment precisely was he subjected to, number one? And number two, given what you’ve said, why is your client being tried in a U.S. court?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: All right. Well, the first question is easier to answer. Mohamed was, as he put it, slapped around by Djibouti authorities. They threatened to use electrodes if he didn’t start talking. He heard the shrieks and the screams of others from other rooms. It was very clear to him that—

AMYGOODMAN: And where was he being held then?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: He was being held in a Djibouti prison.

AMYGOODMAN: By?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: By Djibouti authorities. He was arrested, together with his co-defendants, in an apartment in Djibouti. There were no Americans involved in that initial rough treatment. He made certain statements to the Djibouti authorities. And after that point, agents of the FBI, agents of other agencies, who did not identify themselves very clearly, did interrogate him. But they did so gently. On the other hand, the Djibouti people who slapped him around were seated in the same room with their arms crossed against their chests. So it was quite clear that these Djibouti police were proxies for the American authorities.

AMYGOODMAN: When was he held there? When did his family lose contact with him?

EPHRAIMSAVITT: His family actually lost contact with him sometime in 2008 when he was recruited to join the al-Shabab insurrection in Somalia. He was arrested sometime in the beginning of August this past summer. He was held incommunicado. Nobody knew about his existence until mid-November, when he was brought into the Eastern District of New York, and I and my fellow counsel, Harry Batchelder and Susan Kellman, were appointed to represent the three defendants.

You asked the question as to why he’s being prosecuted in a Brooklyn federal courthouse, and that’s an excellent question. I don’t have a good answer for that. These are folks who were involved, for better or for worse, in a military campaign in eastern Africa. Now they’ve become criminal defendants in the Eastern District of New York. Their first and only contact with the Eastern District or with the United States is when they were brought here in chains and under an accusation of being terrorists. They never targeted civilians. They never hurt civilians. I don’t even know if they were able to hurt any of the enemy soldiers. They have no idea about that. But they were combatants, that’s true.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Clara Gutteridge, before we conclude, can you talk about the significance of John Brennan’s nomination as CIA chief? This is someone in 2005 who said that renditions were an absolutely vital tool of U.S. intelligence.

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Thanks. It’s extremely worrying to me that John Brennan is going to be the CIA chief, and the reason is this. As Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, he has in many ways been the architect of the drone program as we know it. He’s also been responsible for something possibly even more sinister, which is—which will probably be Obama’s legacy with respect to the war on terror. And that is that what was previously a set of ad hoc practices that were, you know, arguably developed in the heat of the moment after 9/11, in the months and years following that, under Obama have become systematized and bureaucratized. And what we have with these systems that Obama and Brennan have marshaled through is a kind of concretization of this idea that the United States is perpetually and indefinitely at war. And everything that we’re seeing with these renditions and secret detentions and drone attacks is something that flows from that. So, whilst the United States perceives itself to be perpetually at war, these kinds of activities will go on. People, like these three defendants, will be regarded as being within the jurisdiction of the United States and being the enemies of the United States. There will be no space for reparations for people that have been wronged, that have been tortured, that have been wrongfully rendered.

AMYGOODMAN: Clara Gutteridge, we’re going to have to leave it at that, director of Equal Justice Forum, and Ephraim Savitt, lawyer representing Mohamed Yusuf. We want to thank you both for being with us.

]]>
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500As Italy Sentences 23 CIA Agents in Rendition Case, Obama Refuses to Prosecute Anyone for Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/21/as_italy_sentences_23_cia_agents
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-21:en/story/52b7a1 AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the road in Madison, Wisconsin. We&#8217;ll be in Eau Claire at noon, and tonight we&#8217;ll be in Hayward, Wisonsin , tomorrow in Minneapolis . I&#8217;ll talk about the details later in the broadcast.
But right now, to the news out of Italy&#8217;s high court, which has upheld the sentences of 23 CIA operatives convicted of kidnapping a Muslim cleric under the U.S. program called &quot;extraordinary rendition.&quot; The cleric, Abu Omar, was seized from the streets of Milan in 2003 and taken to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he was tortured during a four-year imprisonment. The Americans were all convicted in absentia after the United States refused to hand them over. The ruling marks the final appeal in the first trial anywhere in the world involving the CIA&#8217;s practice of rendering terror suspects to countries that allow torture. The Italian government will now be obliged to make a formal request for the extradition of the Americans; however, it&#8217;s all but assured the Obama administration will continue its rejection.
Human Rights Watch praised the Italian court move. Andrea Prasow said, quote, &quot;Since the U.S. Justice Department appears entirely unwilling to investigate and prosecute these very serious crimes, other countries should move forward with their own cases against U.S. officials,&quot; unquote.
So far, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute individuals involved in the U.S. torture and rendition program. But as a candidate four years ago, Obama unequivocally denounced torture and extraordinary rendition.
SEN . BARACK OBAMA : We have to be clear and unequivocal: we do not torture, period. We don&#8217;t torture. Our government does not torture. That should be our position. That should be our position. That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions. We don&#8217;t farm out torture. We don&#8217;t subcontract torture.
AMY GOODMAN : That was then-presidential candidate Obama in 2008 speaking at CNN&#8217;s Compassion Forum.
Well, according to our next guest, four years after Obama made those comments, impunity for torture has now become a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government. We&#8217;re now joined by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He&#8217;s the author of several books, including, most recently, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation . His past books include A Question of Torture and Policing America&#8217;s Empire .
Welcome back to Democracy Now!
ALFRED McCOY: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s great to be in your neighborhood here in Madison.
ALFRED McCOY: Thanks.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor McCoy, the title of your book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation , what is it?
ALFRED McCOY: The U.S. doctrine of coercive interrogation was developed during the Cold War. The CIA led the U.S. security establishment in a wide-ranging period of research that lasted about a decade, and they developed a new form of psychological torture—really the first revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, if not millennia. And it was essentially no-touch torture.
What they discovered through this research, a brilliant psychologist in Canada named Donald O. Hebb found that by putting student volunteers in cubicles with goggles, gloves and ear muffs through this process of sensory deprivation, they would suffer something akin to a psychotic breakdown. And that would also mean that deprived of sensory deprivation when interrogated, they would bond more readily with the interrogator.
The second discovery came through more CIA research into basically KGB Soviet techniques, which found that the—one of the most effective of KGB techniques was not beating the subject but simply making the subject stand immobile for days on an end, something we now call &quot;stress positions.&quot;
And these two techniques—sensory deprivation and stress positions—were articulated in a CIA manual, the &quot; KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation&quot; manual, in 1963 and disseminated throughout U.S. allies and U.S. security agencies. And that became a distinctive form of American psychological torture. That&#8217;s been the basic form we&#8217;ve used for the last 60 years.
AMY GOODMAN : Has it mattered whether there&#8217;s a Democratic or Republican president?
ALFRED McCOY: Yes, it has, actually, because that&#8217;s the sort of default position. This also created a contradiction between the U.S. public commitment to human rights at the U.N. and other international fora and this private doctrine of psychological torture, which seemed to contradict that commitment to human rights.
Under President George W. Bush, the United States resolved this contradiction. President Bush announced to his aides that—right after the 9/11 attacks, he said, &quot;I don&#8217;t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.&quot; He then authorized the CIA to create a fleet of two dozen chartered jets for rendition. And, more importantly, during the Cold War, the CIA trained allies in the use of torture, but we never did it ourselves: we outsourced it. We funded prisons. We harvested the intelligence. President Bush resolved this contradiction by authorizing the CIA to open eight black sites from Thailand to Poland, and therefore, American CIA agents actually engaged in waterboarding, wall slamming and forms of psychological torture under President Bush. We did it ourselves.
What&#8217;s happened under President Obama is we&#8217;ve gone back to that Cold War policy of outsourcing the abuse to our allies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, by, first of all, turning a blind eye to the abuse of our allies, as we did in Iraq until the time we were there, and we&#8217;re doing now in Afghanistan. And then, simultaneously, President Obama authorized the CIA very quietly to conduct extraordinary rendition.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain what extraordinary rendition is.
ALFRED McCOY: Under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, you&#8217;re not allowed to send somebody to a country where they will be subject to human rights abuse as defined by the Convention Against Torture. And rendition is the process of sending somebody to a country where they are likely to be tortured, in effect.
The contradiction between that segment you played and what Obama did is striking. In April of 2008, President Obama—unprompted—said, you know, &quot;I will ban torture, and that includes rendition.&quot; OK. But then, during his first days in office, when he signed that very dramatic order closing those same CIA black sites that we were just discussing, President Obama got—was under pressure from the CIA . The CIA counsel looked at that draft order and said, &quot;If you issue this as drafted, you&#8217;ll put us out of the rendition business.&quot; So, President Obama, being a skillful lawyer, added a footnote, and he defined a CIA prison in a way that exempted a prison for short-term transitory provisions. In other words, the CIA could have holding facilities to effect the rendition of subjects from one country to another on their fleet of executive aircraft. And that&#8217;s in the footnote of that dramatic, highly publicized order closing CIA black sites—except allowing rendition. It&#8217;s right there in the footnote. It was in black and white, but nobody noticed it, until the New York Times brought it out a few months ago.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor McCoy, I wanted to go to the first prime-time press conference that President Obama held after taking office. He was asked his opinion about a proposal put forward by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to start a comprehensive truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the conduct of the Bush administration over that past eight years. This is how President Obama responded.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : My administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm. And I don&#8217;t think those are contradictory. I think they are potentially complementary. My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I&#8217;m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
AMY GOODMAN : That was President Obama, first prime-time news conference. Professor Alfred McCoy?
ALFRED McCOY: That&#8217;s the third stage of impunity. The first stage—and it&#8217;s a universal process. It happens in countries emerging from authoritarianism that have had problems with torture. Step one is blame the bad apples. Donald Rumsfeld did that right after the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed in 2004.
Step two is saying that it was necessary for our national security—unfortunate, perhaps, but necessary to keep us all safe. That was done very articulately by former Vice President Cheney at the time, and he continues to make that argument. He claims that these &quot;enhanced techniques,&quot; as he calls them, i.e. CIA torture, saved thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of lives. OK?
The third step is the step we just witnessed in President Obama, saying that, well, whatever might have happened in the past, we need unity as a nation, we need to move forward together into the future. So, the past isn&#8217;t germane. We need to put it behind us, not investigate, not prosecute. And that was the position he was taking there.
The fourth stage is one that we&#8217;ve been going through for the past year. That&#8217;s been political attack by those implicated, under the Bush administration, in either conducting the torture or authorizing the torture. And that&#8217;s a political tack seeking not just exoneration, getting away with it, but seeking vindication, saying that not only, you know, was this legal, but it was necessary, it was imperative for our national security. And that&#8217;s an argument that the Bush administration made very forcefully when Osama bin Laden was killed in May of 2011. They argued that the enhanced interrogation under the Bush administration led the Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden. There&#8217;s no evidence for that, but they made that argument. And that put pressure on Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the—most of the investigations of CIA abuse. And then, very recently, the two investigations of detainees who were killed in CIA custody have been dropped, as well.
The fifth and final stage is one that&#8217;s ongoing right to the present, and that&#8217;s rewriting the history, rewriting the past, ripping it apart, without respect to the truth of the matter, and reconstructing it in a way that justifies the torture. And that happened on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 when Dick Cheney brought out his memoirs saying that the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah turned this hardened terrorist into—he called him &quot;a fountain of information&quot; that gave information that saved thousands of lives. OK? Well, you know, that was August 30th, 2011.
OK, on September 12th, 2011, former FBI interrogator, counterintelligence officer, Ali Soufan, came out with his memoirs. It turned out he was the American operative that conducted that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. He was there in that safe house in Thailand, and there were two teams operating. And it turned out, in retrospect, when you look at what happened, it was the closest you can get to a scientific experiment into the relative effectiveness of empathetic FBI interrogation techniques and CIA coercive interrogation, CIA torture. And through four successive rounds, what happened is, Ali Soufan went in—he&#8217;s an Arabic speaker—he established empathy with Abu Zubaydah, and he got the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. George Tenet, CIA director, grew angry that the FBI , his rival agency, was getting all this information. He dispatched a team of tough CIA interrogators. They used these coercive techniques. The subject clamped up. No more information. The FBI was brought back in. More information from Abu Zubaydah based on non-coercive techniques.
And by the time this was done through four successive rounds, we established clearly, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, that empathetic FBI techniques, with a skilled interrogator speaking to a subject in his language, OK, gets accurate intelligence. And all these CIA techniques—the sensory deprivation, the temperature modification, the noise blasting, the stress positions—all of that is counterproductive, does not work. OK? And that, that fragile truth, has been kept from us, because if you look at Ali Soufan&#8217;s memoirs, there&#8217;s 181 pages of CIA excisions that turned those passages about that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah into a rat&#8217;s nest of black lines that no regular American reader can possibly understand.
AMY GOODMAN : You write that under President Obama, still we are getting intelligence extracted by surrogates in places like Somalia, in Afghanistan.
ALFRED McCOY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : And what does that mean—through torture?
ALFRED McCOY: What it means is that&#8217;s part of the outsourcing of this, OK? We now know through the WikiLeaks that after the Abu Ghraib scandal we reduced the number of detainees being held by U.S. forces in Iraq, and we transferred the detainees to Iraqi authorities, where the detainees were tortured. There were orders by the U.S. command, OK, that American soldiers, if they came across our Iraqi allies engaged in human rights abuse, they were not to do anything. And we know that from 2004 to 2009 U.S. forces collected, I think, 1,365 reports of Iraqi human rights abuse about which they did nothing.
In Afghanistan, it&#8217;s the same policy. Right after 2004, we started turning over the detainees that needed to be interrogated to the National Directorate of Security. In 2011, the United Nations investigated the Afghan National Security Directorate and found a systematic pattern of absolutely extraordinary human rights abuse, brutal physical tortures. And the United States continues to turn over detainees to the Afghan authorities. Britain and Canada will no longer turn them over, because of their concerns about human rights abuse.
So, in other—and we&#8217;re doing the same thing in Somalia. Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter, did a superb report and found that in Mogadishu, the Somali authorities operate, in their security directorate, a prison called &quot;the Hole&quot; in the basement of their building. And the CIA engages in—
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there, but we&#8217;re going to continue the conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Thank you so much, Professor Alfred McCoy. His book is called Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation . Go online to see the rest at democracynow.org and to see our Election 2012 Silenced Majority Tour . Today we&#8217;ll be in Eau Claire at noon; tonight in Hayward, Wisconsin ; tomorrow, Minneapolis . AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the road in Madison, Wisconsin. We’ll be in Eau Claire at noon, and tonight we’ll be in Hayward, Wisonsin, tomorrow in Minneapolis. I’ll talk about the details later in the broadcast.

But right now, to the news out of Italy’s high court, which has upheld the sentences of 23 CIA operatives convicted of kidnapping a Muslim cleric under the U.S. program called "extraordinary rendition." The cleric, Abu Omar, was seized from the streets of Milan in 2003 and taken to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he was tortured during a four-year imprisonment. The Americans were all convicted in absentia after the United States refused to hand them over. The ruling marks the final appeal in the first trial anywhere in the world involving the CIA’s practice of rendering terror suspects to countries that allow torture. The Italian government will now be obliged to make a formal request for the extradition of the Americans; however, it’s all but assured the Obama administration will continue its rejection.

Human Rights Watch praised the Italian court move. Andrea Prasow said, quote, "Since the U.S. Justice Department appears entirely unwilling to investigate and prosecute these very serious crimes, other countries should move forward with their own cases against U.S. officials," unquote.

So far, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute individuals involved in the U.S. torture and rendition program. But as a candidate four years ago, Obama unequivocally denounced torture and extraordinary rendition.

SEN. BARACKOBAMA: We have to be clear and unequivocal: we do not torture, period. We don’t torture. Our government does not torture. That should be our position. That should be our position. That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions. We don’t farm out torture. We don’t subcontract torture.

AMYGOODMAN: That was then-presidential candidate Obama in 2008 speaking at CNN’s Compassion Forum.

Well, according to our next guest, four years after Obama made those comments, impunity for torture has now become a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government. We’re now joined by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s the author of several books, including, most recently, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. His past books include A Question of Torture and Policing America’s Empire.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!

ALFRED McCOY: Thank you, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s great to be in your neighborhood here in Madison.

ALFRED McCOY: Thanks.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor McCoy, the title of your book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, what is it?

ALFRED McCOY: The U.S. doctrine of coercive interrogation was developed during the Cold War. The CIA led the U.S. security establishment in a wide-ranging period of research that lasted about a decade, and they developed a new form of psychological torture—really the first revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, if not millennia. And it was essentially no-touch torture.

What they discovered through this research, a brilliant psychologist in Canada named Donald O. Hebb found that by putting student volunteers in cubicles with goggles, gloves and ear muffs through this process of sensory deprivation, they would suffer something akin to a psychotic breakdown. And that would also mean that deprived of sensory deprivation when interrogated, they would bond more readily with the interrogator.

The second discovery came through more CIA research into basically KGB Soviet techniques, which found that the—one of the most effective of KGB techniques was not beating the subject but simply making the subject stand immobile for days on an end, something we now call "stress positions."

And these two techniques—sensory deprivation and stress positions—were articulated in a CIA manual, the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, in 1963 and disseminated throughout U.S. allies and U.S. security agencies. And that became a distinctive form of American psychological torture. That’s been the basic form we’ve used for the last 60 years.

AMYGOODMAN: Has it mattered whether there’s a Democratic or Republican president?

ALFRED McCOY: Yes, it has, actually, because that’s the sort of default position. This also created a contradiction between the U.S. public commitment to human rights at the U.N. and other international fora and this private doctrine of psychological torture, which seemed to contradict that commitment to human rights.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States resolved this contradiction. President Bush announced to his aides that—right after the 9/11 attacks, he said, "I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." He then authorized the CIA to create a fleet of two dozen chartered jets for rendition. And, more importantly, during the Cold War, the CIA trained allies in the use of torture, but we never did it ourselves: we outsourced it. We funded prisons. We harvested the intelligence. President Bush resolved this contradiction by authorizing the CIA to open eight black sites from Thailand to Poland, and therefore, American CIA agents actually engaged in waterboarding, wall slamming and forms of psychological torture under President Bush. We did it ourselves.

What’s happened under President Obama is we’ve gone back to that Cold War policy of outsourcing the abuse to our allies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, by, first of all, turning a blind eye to the abuse of our allies, as we did in Iraq until the time we were there, and we’re doing now in Afghanistan. And then, simultaneously, President Obama authorized the CIA very quietly to conduct extraordinary rendition.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain what extraordinary rendition is.

ALFRED McCOY: Under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, you’re not allowed to send somebody to a country where they will be subject to human rights abuse as defined by the Convention Against Torture. And rendition is the process of sending somebody to a country where they are likely to be tortured, in effect.

The contradiction between that segment you played and what Obama did is striking. In April of 2008, President Obama—unprompted—said, you know, "I will ban torture, and that includes rendition." OK. But then, during his first days in office, when he signed that very dramatic order closing those same CIA black sites that we were just discussing, President Obama got—was under pressure from the CIA. The CIA counsel looked at that draft order and said, "If you issue this as drafted, you’ll put us out of the rendition business." So, President Obama, being a skillful lawyer, added a footnote, and he defined a CIA prison in a way that exempted a prison for short-term transitory provisions. In other words, the CIA could have holding facilities to effect the rendition of subjects from one country to another on their fleet of executive aircraft. And that’s in the footnote of that dramatic, highly publicized order closing CIA black sites—except allowing rendition. It’s right there in the footnote. It was in black and white, but nobody noticed it, until the New York Times brought it out a few months ago.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor McCoy, I wanted to go to the first prime-time press conference that President Obama held after taking office. He was asked his opinion about a proposal put forward by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to start a comprehensive truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the conduct of the Bush administration over that past eight years. This is how President Obama responded.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: My administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm. And I don’t think those are contradictory. I think they are potentially complementary. My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

AMYGOODMAN: That was President Obama, first prime-time news conference. Professor Alfred McCoy?

ALFRED McCOY: That’s the third stage of impunity. The first stage—and it’s a universal process. It happens in countries emerging from authoritarianism that have had problems with torture. Step one is blame the bad apples. Donald Rumsfeld did that right after the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed in 2004.

Step two is saying that it was necessary for our national security—unfortunate, perhaps, but necessary to keep us all safe. That was done very articulately by former Vice President Cheney at the time, and he continues to make that argument. He claims that these "enhanced techniques," as he calls them, i.e. CIA torture, saved thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of lives. OK?

The third step is the step we just witnessed in President Obama, saying that, well, whatever might have happened in the past, we need unity as a nation, we need to move forward together into the future. So, the past isn’t germane. We need to put it behind us, not investigate, not prosecute. And that was the position he was taking there.

The fourth stage is one that we’ve been going through for the past year. That’s been political attack by those implicated, under the Bush administration, in either conducting the torture or authorizing the torture. And that’s a political tack seeking not just exoneration, getting away with it, but seeking vindication, saying that not only, you know, was this legal, but it was necessary, it was imperative for our national security. And that’s an argument that the Bush administration made very forcefully when Osama bin Laden was killed in May of 2011. They argued that the enhanced interrogation under the Bush administration led the Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden. There’s no evidence for that, but they made that argument. And that put pressure on Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the—most of the investigations of CIA abuse. And then, very recently, the two investigations of detainees who were killed in CIA custody have been dropped, as well.

The fifth and final stage is one that’s ongoing right to the present, and that’s rewriting the history, rewriting the past, ripping it apart, without respect to the truth of the matter, and reconstructing it in a way that justifies the torture. And that happened on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 when Dick Cheney brought out his memoirs saying that the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah turned this hardened terrorist into—he called him "a fountain of information" that gave information that saved thousands of lives. OK? Well, you know, that was August 30th, 2011.

OK, on September 12th, 2011, former FBI interrogator, counterintelligence officer, Ali Soufan, came out with his memoirs. It turned out he was the American operative that conducted that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. He was there in that safe house in Thailand, and there were two teams operating. And it turned out, in retrospect, when you look at what happened, it was the closest you can get to a scientific experiment into the relative effectiveness of empathetic FBI interrogation techniques and CIA coercive interrogation, CIA torture. And through four successive rounds, what happened is, Ali Soufan went in—he’s an Arabic speaker—he established empathy with Abu Zubaydah, and he got the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. George Tenet, CIA director, grew angry that the FBI, his rival agency, was getting all this information. He dispatched a team of tough CIA interrogators. They used these coercive techniques. The subject clamped up. No more information. The FBI was brought back in. More information from Abu Zubaydah based on non-coercive techniques.

And by the time this was done through four successive rounds, we established clearly, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, that empathetic FBI techniques, with a skilled interrogator speaking to a subject in his language, OK, gets accurate intelligence. And all these CIA techniques—the sensory deprivation, the temperature modification, the noise blasting, the stress positions—all of that is counterproductive, does not work. OK? And that, that fragile truth, has been kept from us, because if you look at Ali Soufan’s memoirs, there’s 181 pages of CIA excisions that turned those passages about that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah into a rat’s nest of black lines that no regular American reader can possibly understand.

AMYGOODMAN: You write that under President Obama, still we are getting intelligence extracted by surrogates in places like Somalia, in Afghanistan.

ALFRED McCOY: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: And what does that mean—through torture?

ALFRED McCOY: What it means is that’s part of the outsourcing of this, OK? We now know through the WikiLeaks that after the Abu Ghraib scandal we reduced the number of detainees being held by U.S. forces in Iraq, and we transferred the detainees to Iraqi authorities, where the detainees were tortured. There were orders by the U.S. command, OK, that American soldiers, if they came across our Iraqi allies engaged in human rights abuse, they were not to do anything. And we know that from 2004 to 2009 U.S. forces collected, I think, 1,365 reports of Iraqi human rights abuse about which they did nothing.

In Afghanistan, it’s the same policy. Right after 2004, we started turning over the detainees that needed to be interrogated to the National Directorate of Security. In 2011, the United Nations investigated the Afghan National Security Directorate and found a systematic pattern of absolutely extraordinary human rights abuse, brutal physical tortures. And the United States continues to turn over detainees to the Afghan authorities. Britain and Canada will no longer turn them over, because of their concerns about human rights abuse.

So, in other—and we’re doing the same thing in Somalia. Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter, did a superb report and found that in Mogadishu, the Somali authorities operate, in their security directorate, a prison called "the Hole" in the basement of their building. And the CIA engages in—

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue the conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Thank you so much, Professor Alfred McCoy. His book is called Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation . Go online to see the rest at democracynow.org and to see our Election 2012 Silenced Majority Tour. Today we’ll be in Eau Claire at noon; tonight in Hayward, Wisconsin; tomorrow, Minneapolis.

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Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400Rendered, Tortured & Discarded: A Shocking Story of an Innocent Man's Ordeal in U.S. Prisons Abroadhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/6/rendered_tortured_discarded_a_shocking_story
tag:democracynow.org,2012-07-06:en/story/6ccc57 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a shocking new story about U.S. secret operations in Africa. The Nation magazine has just published an exposé titled &quot;How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man.&quot; The article by human rights investigator Clara Gutteridge recounts the ordeal of a Tanzanian man named Suleiman Abdallah. He was captured in Mogadishu in 2003 by a Somali warlord and handed over to U.S. officials, who had rendered him to Afghanistan for five years of detention and torture. Imprisoned in three different U.S. facilities, Abdallah said he was subjected to severe beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, forced nakedness and humiliation. He said he was also sexually assaulted, locked naked in a coffin, and forced to lie on a wet mat, naked and handcuffed. Suleiman was finally released in July 2008 from Bagram Air Force Base—with a piece of paper confirming his innocence. However, he has received neither reparations nor apologies for his ordeal.
For more, we&#8217;re joined in London by Clara Gutteridge. She used to work as a secret prisons investigator at the human rights organization Reprieve.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Thank you.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you lay out for us how you came across this case and how you got involved in Suleiman Abdallah&#8217;s situation?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : My job at Reprieve used to be finding disappeared people, people who had been disappeared by the United States in the context of the war on terror. And, you know, my methods were quite varied, but one of the things I used to frequently do would be to interview people who had just been released from one of these secret prisons and ask them about the other people that they were detained with. And they could usually remember quite well who was there. And so, from that, I kind of built up this list of people. [inaudible] 2007 onwards, my work increasingly focused on East Africa, and I had this list of people that I would always ask [inaudible]—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We seem to have lost Clara Gutteridge. We&#8217;re going to try to see if we can get her back. Her recent piece for The Nation is called &quot;How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man.&quot; We&#8217;re trying to see if we can get that connection back. OK, well, we&#8217;ll take a break while we try to see if we can get Clara Gutteridge back on the line. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. We&#8217;ll be back in a minute.
[break]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Juan González. We&#8217;re still having trouble getting to Clara Gutteridge, so we&#8217;re going to move now to Peru...
[ Peru segment ]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We&#8217;re joined now by the British human rights investigator, Clara Gutteridge, we had on before, before we had the difficulties. We were talking with her about the U.S. secret operations in Africa. The Nation magazine has just published her exposé titled &quot;How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man.&quot; The story recounts the ordeal of a Tanzanian man named Suleiman Abdallah.
Clara Gutteridge, welcome back to Democracy Now! Hopefully we&#8217;ll be able to keep you on the line this time. Continue with where you left off, talking about how you learned of Suleiman Abdallah&#8217;s situation.
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : OK, thanks.
So I was saying that my job at Reprieve a couple of years ago involved, essentially, building files on people who had disappeared in the context of the U.S. war on terror, people who were being held in the network of secret prisons around the world. And one of the cases I was building a file on was Suleiman Abdallah&#8217;s. And routinely, what I would do would be things like interview people that had just been released from U.S. detention, put that together with other sorts of documentation, then, hopefully, ultimately, find out where somebody was being held and get representation—get authorization to represent them in prison.
But the thing that happened with Suleiman&#8217;s file was that it just grew and grew and grew, and I still had no idea where he was. So I found out all of this really fascinating stuff about, you know, how he&#8217;d been picked up in Somalia in 2003, sold by a warlord, funny things about his personality and his life. His nickname is Travolta, because he was very fond of dancing—things like this. But I had no idea, you know, where he was being held. And I would—every time I met somebody that had been held in one of these prisons, I would ask them, &quot;Do you know, Suleiman Abdallah, an East African man?&quot; And the answer was always no. And then, eventually, in 2008, I learned off record that he was being held in Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which is or was essentially Guantánamo Bay&#8217;s lesser-known, more evil twin. And then, not long after that, I heard through kind of NGO contracts that he had been released and that he was at home in Tanzania or in the island of Zanzibar. And so, I went to meet him.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, can you trace for us his amazing odyssey from country to country and how this happened?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right. Well, I mean, it&#8217;s been—it&#8217;s very difficult to piece together, obviously. And we only know, you know, some of—some of what happened. But he&#8217;s from Zanzibar. He grew up in Zanzibar, like many people from that island. He was fond of fishing, and he was, you know, good with boats. And so, he ended up being a kind of itinerant trader going up and down the coast from Zanzibar up the Kenyan coast to the southern bit of Somalia, which is also Swahili-speaking. And he was kind of trundling up and down in his boat and then ended up in Mogadishu, where he got a job for a couple of weeks.
And then he was abducted by a notorious warlord whose name is Mohamed Dhere, who still lives in Mogadishu—in fact, he&#8217;s one of the most powerful people in Somalia still, he&#8217;s had various roles in successive Somali governments—sold for a bounty to Americans, presumably, members of the CIA , who rendered him via Djibouti and Kenya to secret prisons in Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan, he was held, first of all, in a prison he called &quot;The Darkness,&quot; which we think is a prison called the &quot;Dark Prison,&quot; where prisoners are held in pitch black with music pumping 24 hours a day, where they&#8217;re like very, very seriously abused, no access to lawyers; then taken to a prison called the &quot;Salt Pit,&quot; which was slightly better, although not much better; and then, ultimately, to Bagram Air Force Base, where he was held for about five years, until he was ultimately released, sent back to Tanzania in 2008.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the original reason why the U.S. government took him and jailed him?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right. Well, this is obviously—is very difficult to piece together, because the U.S. government won&#8217;t talk about why this happened. But it seems as though—so, in Somalia, between 2002 and 2005, there was this system of—essentially, the CIA would pay warlords money for so-called terror suspects. The same thing happened in Pakistan. Eighty-five percent of the people in Guantánamo Bay, in fact, were sold for a bounty in Pakistan rather than being picked up off any battlefield. And in Somalia, this was going on, as well, although it was much quieter, there was less attention. And we think that Suleiman may have originally been sold as—passed off, if you like, as a notorious terror suspect called Fazul, who was ultimately, you know, killed only last year. Of course, he wasn&#8217;t Fazul. He was a nobody from Tanzania. One thing we have noticed is that it tends to be kind of what tended to be the more kind of light-skinned, foreign-looking people that were sold, you know, maybe because, you know, as in Pakistan, it was more Arab-looking people, so people that could be passed off as something—something suspicious.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I summarized in the introduction some of what he went through, but could you describe for us what you learned was some of the torture and the treatment that he underwent, the abuses that he underwent?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right. Well, I mean, the worst of the torture, we&#8217;re not authorized to talk about, because it&#8217;s too painful for him to talk about, and he doesn&#8217;t want it to be made public. What I can say is that he was subject to some of the worst torture that I have ever encountered in, you know, interviewing over a hundred U.S. torture victims. He was routinely beaten. He was sexually assaulted. He was locked in a cage. He was locked in a kind of—in a coffin-shaped box. He was subjected to extreme temperatures of hot and cold. He was threatened that, you know, he would never be released again. You know, the list really is endless. It took—it took, you know, two intensive days of debriefing for the medical experts to document what he went through. So, obviously, I can&#8217;t really summarize it all in such a short space of time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And who did he say inflicted this torture on him?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : You know, U.S.—generally speaking, it was a series of different people, but mainly U.S. personnel, so DOD and other—probably the CIA , although we—of course, we can&#8217;t be certain.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you tell us about the overall role of the United States forces, CIA and Special Forces in Africa, where he was originally abducted?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right. So, when Suleiman was abducted in 2003, that was in the middle of this—there was this arrangement between the CIA and Somali warlords, who were then in control of most of Somalia, called—euphemistically called the Alliance of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. And what that really was was an arrangement whereby the warlords—you know, there was no—there was no law. These people were just, you know, in de facto control. The warlords would go around and would pick people up and would sell them for, you know, large amounts of money to the CIA . And at that time, people were routinely, you know, rendered off into—rendered into different parts of the world to be held in different U.S. prisons.
Now, you know, like everywhere else, the U.S.—you know, since, say, let&#8217;s say 2007, the U.S. has increasingly been seeking to get out of the detention game. It&#8217;s no longer running, you know, masses of prisons all around the world where detainees are held. But what&#8217;s happening now in East Africa is that the war on terror is very much alive and kicking, although it&#8217;s more decentralized and outsourced than it used to be, which means that the role of partner states, of local, regional states, is much more important. They&#8217;re receiving, you know, masses of money, masses of aid, to conduct counterterrorism. And what we&#8217;re increasingly seeing is that it is these states that are doing the jailing, either on behalf of the United States or perhaps in some kind of, you know, joint detention operation. And for those of us kind of working on rule of law issues and trying to ensure that these prisoners get—you know, get the rights that they deserve, it is even more difficult than working with prisons that are, you know, on the face of it, obviously run by the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I want to ask you about those U.S. operations, for instance, in Somalia. Last year, Jeremy Scahill of The Nation and Democracy Now! traveled to Mogadishu and revealed the existence of a secret CIA facility in that city.
JEREMY SCAHILL : When we arrived in Mogadishu, within days, we discovered that the CIA had just finished construction of a pretty massive compound at the Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu. And the compound, which is not even hidden in plain sight—it&#8217;s just in plain sight—looks like a gated community. It has about a dozen buildings inside of it, brand new. It&#8217;s a walled compound with guard posts at all of its—at each of its four corners. It&#8217;s right on the banks of the Indian Ocean. And then next to it there are six or eight small hangars. And the CIA also has its own aircraft there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, your response to this Jeremy Scahill report?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right. I mean, you know, it is common knowledge amongst, you know, not only Somalis in Mogadishu but really most people that go through Mogadishu, you know, that this prison exists and that there is, you know, clearly, a kind of a multilateral detention operation going on in Somalia that involves, you know, secret detention of prisoners. You know, the only person [inaudible] who said to the BBC Somali Service that he didn&#8217;t know anything about it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: OK, and finally, Suleiman Abdallah, his situation now? He&#8217;s gotten no compensation for his years of unjust jailing or extralegal jailing?
CLARA GUTTERIDGE : Right. So, you know, Suleiman Abdallah is right now, you know, struggling against significant odds to rebuild his life after what he&#8217;s been through. U.S. torture is very, very effective at totally unraveling people, you know, but there is—there are no resources put into, you know, helping people once they&#8217;ve been released, if they&#8217;re found innocent, to put themselves back together, to rebuild their lives. And so, Suleiman is—you know, he&#8217;s doing extremely well, but, you know, it&#8217;s very, very difficult for him.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Clara Gutteridge, I want to thank you for joining us. She&#8217;s a human rights investigator. Her recent piece for The Nation is called &quot;How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man.&quot; We&#8217;ll be back in a minute. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a shocking new story about U.S. secret operations in Africa. The Nation magazine has just published an exposé titled "How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man." The article by human rights investigator Clara Gutteridge recounts the ordeal of a Tanzanian man named Suleiman Abdallah. He was captured in Mogadishu in 2003 by a Somali warlord and handed over to U.S. officials, who had rendered him to Afghanistan for five years of detention and torture. Imprisoned in three different U.S. facilities, Abdallah said he was subjected to severe beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, forced nakedness and humiliation. He said he was also sexually assaulted, locked naked in a coffin, and forced to lie on a wet mat, naked and handcuffed. Suleiman was finally released in July 2008 from Bagram Air Force Base—with a piece of paper confirming his innocence. However, he has received neither reparations nor apologies for his ordeal.

For more, we’re joined in London by Clara Gutteridge. She used to work as a secret prisons investigator at the human rights organization Reprieve.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Thank you.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you lay out for us how you came across this case and how you got involved in Suleiman Abdallah’s situation?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: My job at Reprieve used to be finding disappeared people, people who had been disappeared by the United States in the context of the war on terror. And, you know, my methods were quite varied, but one of the things I used to frequently do would be to interview people who had just been released from one of these secret prisons and ask them about the other people that they were detained with. And they could usually remember quite well who was there. And so, from that, I kind of built up this list of people. [inaudible] 2007 onwards, my work increasingly focused on East Africa, and I had this list of people that I would always ask [inaudible]—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We seem to have lost Clara Gutteridge. We’re going to try to see if we can get her back. Her recent piece for The Nation is called "How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man." We’re trying to see if we can get that connection back. OK, well, we’ll take a break while we try to see if we can get Clara Gutteridge back on the line. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Juan González. We’re still having trouble getting to Clara Gutteridge, so we’re going to move now to Peru...

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re joined now by the British human rights investigator, Clara Gutteridge, we had on before, before we had the difficulties. We were talking with her about the U.S. secret operations in Africa. The Nation magazine has just published her exposé titled "How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man." The story recounts the ordeal of a Tanzanian man named Suleiman Abdallah.

Clara Gutteridge, welcome back to Democracy Now! Hopefully we’ll be able to keep you on the line this time. Continue with where you left off, talking about how you learned of Suleiman Abdallah’s situation.

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: OK, thanks.

So I was saying that my job at Reprieve a couple of years ago involved, essentially, building files on people who had disappeared in the context of the U.S. war on terror, people who were being held in the network of secret prisons around the world. And one of the cases I was building a file on was Suleiman Abdallah’s. And routinely, what I would do would be things like interview people that had just been released from U.S. detention, put that together with other sorts of documentation, then, hopefully, ultimately, find out where somebody was being held and get representation—get authorization to represent them in prison.

But the thing that happened with Suleiman’s file was that it just grew and grew and grew, and I still had no idea where he was. So I found out all of this really fascinating stuff about, you know, how he’d been picked up in Somalia in 2003, sold by a warlord, funny things about his personality and his life. His nickname is Travolta, because he was very fond of dancing—things like this. But I had no idea, you know, where he was being held. And I would—every time I met somebody that had been held in one of these prisons, I would ask them, "Do you know, Suleiman Abdallah, an East African man?" And the answer was always no. And then, eventually, in 2008, I learned off record that he was being held in Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which is or was essentially Guantánamo Bay’s lesser-known, more evil twin. And then, not long after that, I heard through kind of NGO contracts that he had been released and that he was at home in Tanzania or in the island of Zanzibar. And so, I went to meet him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, can you trace for us his amazing odyssey from country to country and how this happened?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right. Well, I mean, it’s been—it’s very difficult to piece together, obviously. And we only know, you know, some of—some of what happened. But he’s from Zanzibar. He grew up in Zanzibar, like many people from that island. He was fond of fishing, and he was, you know, good with boats. And so, he ended up being a kind of itinerant trader going up and down the coast from Zanzibar up the Kenyan coast to the southern bit of Somalia, which is also Swahili-speaking. And he was kind of trundling up and down in his boat and then ended up in Mogadishu, where he got a job for a couple of weeks.

And then he was abducted by a notorious warlord whose name is Mohamed Dhere, who still lives in Mogadishu—in fact, he’s one of the most powerful people in Somalia still, he’s had various roles in successive Somali governments—sold for a bounty to Americans, presumably, members of the CIA, who rendered him via Djibouti and Kenya to secret prisons in Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan, he was held, first of all, in a prison he called "The Darkness," which we think is a prison called the "Dark Prison," where prisoners are held in pitch black with music pumping 24 hours a day, where they’re like very, very seriously abused, no access to lawyers; then taken to a prison called the "Salt Pit," which was slightly better, although not much better; and then, ultimately, to Bagram Air Force Base, where he was held for about five years, until he was ultimately released, sent back to Tanzania in 2008.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the original reason why the U.S. government took him and jailed him?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right. Well, this is obviously—is very difficult to piece together, because the U.S. government won’t talk about why this happened. But it seems as though—so, in Somalia, between 2002 and 2005, there was this system of—essentially, the CIA would pay warlords money for so-called terror suspects. The same thing happened in Pakistan. Eighty-five percent of the people in Guantánamo Bay, in fact, were sold for a bounty in Pakistan rather than being picked up off any battlefield. And in Somalia, this was going on, as well, although it was much quieter, there was less attention. And we think that Suleiman may have originally been sold as—passed off, if you like, as a notorious terror suspect called Fazul, who was ultimately, you know, killed only last year. Of course, he wasn’t Fazul. He was a nobody from Tanzania. One thing we have noticed is that it tends to be kind of what tended to be the more kind of light-skinned, foreign-looking people that were sold, you know, maybe because, you know, as in Pakistan, it was more Arab-looking people, so people that could be passed off as something—something suspicious.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I summarized in the introduction some of what he went through, but could you describe for us what you learned was some of the torture and the treatment that he underwent, the abuses that he underwent?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right. Well, I mean, the worst of the torture, we’re not authorized to talk about, because it’s too painful for him to talk about, and he doesn’t want it to be made public. What I can say is that he was subject to some of the worst torture that I have ever encountered in, you know, interviewing over a hundred U.S. torture victims. He was routinely beaten. He was sexually assaulted. He was locked in a cage. He was locked in a kind of—in a coffin-shaped box. He was subjected to extreme temperatures of hot and cold. He was threatened that, you know, he would never be released again. You know, the list really is endless. It took—it took, you know, two intensive days of debriefing for the medical experts to document what he went through. So, obviously, I can’t really summarize it all in such a short space of time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And who did he say inflicted this torture on him?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: You know, U.S.—generally speaking, it was a series of different people, but mainly U.S. personnel, so DOD and other—probably the CIA, although we—of course, we can’t be certain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you tell us about the overall role of the United States forces, CIA and Special Forces in Africa, where he was originally abducted?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right. So, when Suleiman was abducted in 2003, that was in the middle of this—there was this arrangement between the CIA and Somali warlords, who were then in control of most of Somalia, called—euphemistically called the Alliance of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. And what that really was was an arrangement whereby the warlords—you know, there was no—there was no law. These people were just, you know, in de facto control. The warlords would go around and would pick people up and would sell them for, you know, large amounts of money to the CIA. And at that time, people were routinely, you know, rendered off into—rendered into different parts of the world to be held in different U.S. prisons.

Now, you know, like everywhere else, the U.S.—you know, since, say, let’s say 2007, the U.S. has increasingly been seeking to get out of the detention game. It’s no longer running, you know, masses of prisons all around the world where detainees are held. But what’s happening now in East Africa is that the war on terror is very much alive and kicking, although it’s more decentralized and outsourced than it used to be, which means that the role of partner states, of local, regional states, is much more important. They’re receiving, you know, masses of money, masses of aid, to conduct counterterrorism. And what we’re increasingly seeing is that it is these states that are doing the jailing, either on behalf of the United States or perhaps in some kind of, you know, joint detention operation. And for those of us kind of working on rule of law issues and trying to ensure that these prisoners get—you know, get the rights that they deserve, it is even more difficult than working with prisons that are, you know, on the face of it, obviously run by the United States.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I want to ask you about those U.S. operations, for instance, in Somalia. Last year, Jeremy Scahill of The Nation and Democracy Now! traveled to Mogadishu and revealed the existence of a secret CIA facility in that city.

JEREMYSCAHILL: When we arrived in Mogadishu, within days, we discovered that the CIA had just finished construction of a pretty massive compound at the Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu. And the compound, which is not even hidden in plain sight—it’s just in plain sight—looks like a gated community. It has about a dozen buildings inside of it, brand new. It’s a walled compound with guard posts at all of its—at each of its four corners. It’s right on the banks of the Indian Ocean. And then next to it there are six or eight small hangars. And the CIA also has its own aircraft there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, your response to this Jeremy Scahill report?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right. I mean, you know, it is common knowledge amongst, you know, not only Somalis in Mogadishu but really most people that go through Mogadishu, you know, that this prison exists and that there is, you know, clearly, a kind of a multilateral detention operation going on in Somalia that involves, you know, secret detention of prisoners. You know, the only person [inaudible] who said to the BBC Somali Service that he didn’t know anything about it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: OK, and finally, Suleiman Abdallah, his situation now? He’s gotten no compensation for his years of unjust jailing or extralegal jailing?

CLARAGUTTERIDGE: Right. So, you know, Suleiman Abdallah is right now, you know, struggling against significant odds to rebuild his life after what he’s been through. U.S. torture is very, very effective at totally unraveling people, you know, but there is—there are no resources put into, you know, helping people once they’ve been released, if they’re found innocent, to put themselves back together, to rebuild their lives. And so, Suleiman is—you know, he’s doing extremely well, but, you know, it’s very, very difficult for him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Clara Gutteridge, I want to thank you for joining us. She’s a human rights investigator. Her recent piece for The Nation is called "How the US Rendered, Tortured and Discarded One Innocent Man." We’ll be back in a minute.

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Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400With Indefinite Detention Measure, Has Congress Also Expanded Rendition of U.S. Citizens Abroad?http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/22/with_indefinite_detention_measure_has_congress
tag:democracynow.org,2011-12-22:en/story/fb18ed JUAN GONZALEZ : The Obama administration is continuing to come under intense criticism from civil liberties groups for supporting a controversial defense spending bill that some legal experts say could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention by the U.S. government. The bill would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial.
The bill has already been approved by Congress and is awaiting the President&#8217;s signature. Originally, President Obama threatened to veto the legislation but eventually backed down as the law was slightly reworked. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said President Obama would issue a signing statement when he signs the bill. Holder said, quote, &quot;We made really substantial progress in moving from something that was really unacceptable to the administration to something with which we still have problems.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : While much of the media focus has been on the bill&#8217;s provisions regarding indefinite detention, Mother Jones magazine has revealed the bill also contains text that could make it easier for the U.S. government to transfer American citizens to foreign regimes and security forces, a process known as rendition.
For more on this, we&#8217;re joined by Nick Baumann, the reporter for Mother Jones who writes about national security issues. He is with us in Washington, D.C.
Nick, talk about the significance of this other aspect of the defense bill that we have heard very little about.
NICK BAUMANN : So, there&#8217;s a menu of options in the bill for how the president—after he determines someone is a member of al-Qaeda or a member of the Taliban or member of associated forces or has supported those groups, there&#8217;s a menu of options for what he can do. He can send the person to a civilian trial, which is what civil libertarians would prefer. He could send the person to a military commission, essentially. He could detain the person indefinitely, which is what has raised so much controversy so far. And then there&#8217;s a fourth option, which allows him to transfer the terrorist suspect to a foreign country or any other foreign entity, which could be—could mean just about anything.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And Nick, in terms of this associated forces, could you—I mean, that&#8217;s a very general term—al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces. And obviously, the definition is not there of what &quot;associated forces&quot; means. Your sense of what that could mean?
NICK BAUMANN : Well, they want to include groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which didn&#8217;t exist on 9/11, which is what the Authorization for Use of Military Force was for—it was to go after, originally, the people who perpetrated 9/11—al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is sort of the North African branch, and other groups like that. But it could conceivably be expanded further. It depends on how the executive branch decides they want to interpret that provision.
AMY GOODMAN : Nick, talk about the U.S. citizens detained abroad and were the subject of rendition, sent to other places.
NICK BAUMANN : Well, the interesting thing here is, I reported over the summer—and you can find this story on our website at motherjones.com —about this process called proxy detention, which civil libertarians have pointed out, these multiple cases of Americans who claim that they&#8217;ve been picked up by foreign security forces, interrogated, sometimes abused, and basically the questions they&#8217;re asked are questions that they believe could only have come from U.S. law enforcement. And my story over the summer, which was also in the September-October issue of our magazine, explained how the FBI really does have a program to facilitate these sorts of detentions on a case-by-case basis. And so you see people like Gulet Mohamed, who is a teenager from Virginia. There&#8217;s a guy, Abu Ali, who was eventually brought back to the U.S. and tried in a civilian court, but was detained by the Saudis, and a number of other cases.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Could you tell us a little bit about Gulet Mohamed&#8217;s case?
NICK BAUMANN : So, Gulet traveled abroad to stay with family. He visited family in Yemen and Somalia, which of course probably raises red flags with the government. And then he—because of radicalization there. And then he was living in Kuwait for a while. And basically what happened is, when he was at the airport, he was suddenly picked up by men who he believed to be Kuwaiti security forces and taken to a place where he claims he was tortured, basically a black site. Eventually, he was transferred out of that facility and then to a deportation facility, where he was able to contact the New York Times and get his story out there. And he was eventually released.
AMY GOODMAN : You also write in this previous piece, &quot;Locked Up Abroad—for the FBI ,&quot; about the story of the California auto parts business owner, Naji Hamdan, and what happened to him.
NICK BAUMANN : Yeah. So, Mr. Hamdan was picked up by U.A.E. security forces, and he basically claims—he has a very similar story to Gulet Mohamed. He claims that while he was being interrogated, there was someone in the room who he believed to be an American agent or a non-U.A.E. national who was sort of, you know, overseeing the whole operation. And he was investigated by the FBI , but he—back in the States, but he was never charged with anything. And he was eventually released by the U.A.E., and he now lives in Lebanon.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, some Democrats who have supported this bill have claimed that it doesn&#8217;t really add any new powers above existing law. Could you talk about this issue of existing law?
NICK BAUMANN : OK. So, there are a couple provisions in there that say, you know, we&#8217;re just codifying existing law. But the issue is that that really matters, when you take something that is previously the Bush administration&#8217;s or the Obama administration&#8217;s interpretations of its war powers and you turn that into actual legislated and passed law. That serves as a signal to judges about how they should interpret previous laws, how they should interpret what the executive branch is claiming it has the power to do. And, you know, it really has a broad effect.
AMY GOODMAN : I just want to understand this, Nick. Are you talking about American citizens—in the examples we just talked about, in Gulet or the case of Naji Hamdan, these are Americans who went abroad. And you keep talking about the script that&#8217;s followed when they&#8217;re picked up. They might first be questioned by FBI , perhaps here. They go abroad. Then they&#8217;re questioned by local security forces with information that they only could have gotten, the local security forces, from the United States. Are you saying, in this bill, that Americans could be picked up here and sent to another country?
NICK BAUMANN : I think that there is a lot of evidence that that could happen. Obviously, the government isn&#8217;t currently in the business of doing this. And if someone was arrested in the U.S. and sent to another country, it would presumably raise an outcry. But you can imagine circumstances where, for example, someone is arrested in Yemen by U.S. forces and then handed over to local security forces. And this definitely makes that easier.
AMY GOODMAN : And talk about the longstanding, but undisclosed, program, until now, the kind of reporting you&#8217;ve been doing about what the U.S. does and what they&#8217;re starting to admit.
NICK BAUMANN : OK. So, this program is sort of different from the—from having the U.S. pick up people itself and transfer to another country. The program I&#8217;ve been writing about, which is sometimes referred to as proxy detention, is when local authorities sort of pick up someone at the behest of or with the encouragement of the United States, and someone who&#8217;s a U.S. citizen. And you see this increasingly over the past five years, but it&#8217;s really been happening since at least the Bush administration, perhaps earlier. And basically, the FBI , over the world, has relationships with local law enforcement, local security forces, and they have officer FBI agents in those countries, sort of senior FBI agents, called legal attachés, who coordinate with local forces. And if there&#8217;s someone who&#8217;s traveling in that country who they believe is a terrorist threat, even if that person is an American, they are going to, you know, suggest or hint to the local forces that it might be in their interest to pick this person up.
AMY GOODMAN : And even if they&#8217;re questioned and picked up and finally released, and they&#8217;re picked up and they&#8217;re questioned with information that&#8217;s coming from the United States, they might be put on a no-fly list, and so they can&#8217;t come back?
NICK BAUMANN : Yeah, this is very common. There&#8217;s an even broader universe of people—and there&#8217;s actually an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit about this right now—who are prevented from returning to the U.S., unless they cooperate with FBI questioning, because they&#8217;re on the no-fly list. And people have argued that that&#8217;s unconstitutional, because one of the most fundamental rights of an American citizen is to be in America, to return to America. And all the Supreme Court justices have agreed on that in previous rulings, so I think they have a pretty good chance in court. The important thing about this proxy detention bit is that the FBI did acknowledge to me that it does sort of have these relationships with foreign governments and that it does at times submit questions and receive answers about people who are being interrogated in foreign custody. So this coordination really does exist.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And Nick, this announcement by Attorney General Holder that the President will sign the bill with a signing statement—now, it&#8217;s hard to predict what the signing statement might be, but were you surprised by that particular aspect of the announcement? Because everyone expected him to sign the bill. And what do you think could be some of the areas that he might touch on in that signing statement?
NICK BAUMANN : So, I wasn&#8217;t that surprised by the signing statement, because President Obama has used signing statements in the past, especially with regards to defense authorization bills. I believe he used one on the previous defense authorization bill, because there are some transfer restrictions regarding Guantánamo detainees. But the administration&#8217;s big concern is they don&#8217;t want anything in the bill to sort of infringe on their ability to do what they want with regards to prosecuting the war on terror. I don&#8217;t think that they are particularly concerned about, you know, these allegations that could allow for indefinite detention or rendition. I think they want as much flexibility as possible, and the signing statement will probably be directed in that way, to say, you know, &quot;We&#8217;re going to interpret this to give us a broad—a broad mandate to prosecute the war on terror.&quot; So, civil libertarians shouldn&#8217;t get their hopes up about that signing statement in any way. I have learned—I learned last night that the bill hasn&#8217;t actually been physically sent to Obama for signature yet, so, you know, they could still make some enrollment corrections to the bill, and then we&#8217;ll see what happens. I&#8217;ve also asked the White House repeatedly what the schedule for signing the bill is, and they haven&#8217;t responded. And I don&#8217;t believe anyone else has reported when he plans to sign it.
AMY GOODMAN : Nick Baumann, I want to thank you for being with us, reporter at Mother Jones magazine, covers national politics and civil liberties issues. We will link to your reports at democracynow.org. When we come back, we&#8217;re going to Arizona to talk about a scathing report that&#8217;s just been issued by the Justice Department around Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Stay with us. JUANGONZALEZ: The Obama administration is continuing to come under intense criticism from civil liberties groups for supporting a controversial defense spending bill that some legal experts say could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention by the U.S. government. The bill would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial.

The bill has already been approved by Congress and is awaiting the President’s signature. Originally, President Obama threatened to veto the legislation but eventually backed down as the law was slightly reworked. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said President Obama would issue a signing statement when he signs the bill. Holder said, quote, "We made really substantial progress in moving from something that was really unacceptable to the administration to something with which we still have problems."

AMYGOODMAN: While much of the media focus has been on the bill’s provisions regarding indefinite detention, Mother Jones magazine has revealed the bill also contains text that could make it easier for the U.S. government to transfer American citizens to foreign regimes and security forces, a process known as rendition.

For more on this, we’re joined by Nick Baumann, the reporter for Mother Jones who writes about national security issues. He is with us in Washington, D.C.

Nick, talk about the significance of this other aspect of the defense bill that we have heard very little about.

NICKBAUMANN: So, there’s a menu of options in the bill for how the president—after he determines someone is a member of al-Qaeda or a member of the Taliban or member of associated forces or has supported those groups, there’s a menu of options for what he can do. He can send the person to a civilian trial, which is what civil libertarians would prefer. He could send the person to a military commission, essentially. He could detain the person indefinitely, which is what has raised so much controversy so far. And then there’s a fourth option, which allows him to transfer the terrorist suspect to a foreign country or any other foreign entity, which could be—could mean just about anything.

JUANGONZALEZ: And Nick, in terms of this associated forces, could you—I mean, that’s a very general term—al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces. And obviously, the definition is not there of what "associated forces" means. Your sense of what that could mean?

NICKBAUMANN: Well, they want to include groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which didn’t exist on 9/11, which is what the Authorization for Use of Military Force was for—it was to go after, originally, the people who perpetrated 9/11—al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is sort of the North African branch, and other groups like that. But it could conceivably be expanded further. It depends on how the executive branch decides they want to interpret that provision.

AMYGOODMAN: Nick, talk about the U.S. citizens detained abroad and were the subject of rendition, sent to other places.

NICKBAUMANN: Well, the interesting thing here is, I reported over the summer—and you can find this story on our website at motherjones.com—about this process called proxy detention, which civil libertarians have pointed out, these multiple cases of Americans who claim that they’ve been picked up by foreign security forces, interrogated, sometimes abused, and basically the questions they’re asked are questions that they believe could only have come from U.S. law enforcement. And my story over the summer, which was also in the September-October issue of our magazine, explained how the FBI really does have a program to facilitate these sorts of detentions on a case-by-case basis. And so you see people like Gulet Mohamed, who is a teenager from Virginia. There’s a guy, Abu Ali, who was eventually brought back to the U.S. and tried in a civilian court, but was detained by the Saudis, and a number of other cases.

JUANGONZALEZ: Could you tell us a little bit about Gulet Mohamed’s case?

NICKBAUMANN: So, Gulet traveled abroad to stay with family. He visited family in Yemen and Somalia, which of course probably raises red flags with the government. And then he—because of radicalization there. And then he was living in Kuwait for a while. And basically what happened is, when he was at the airport, he was suddenly picked up by men who he believed to be Kuwaiti security forces and taken to a place where he claims he was tortured, basically a black site. Eventually, he was transferred out of that facility and then to a deportation facility, where he was able to contact the New York Times and get his story out there. And he was eventually released.

AMYGOODMAN: You also write in this previous piece, "Locked Up Abroad—for the FBI," about the story of the California auto parts business owner, Naji Hamdan, and what happened to him.

NICKBAUMANN: Yeah. So, Mr. Hamdan was picked up by U.A.E. security forces, and he basically claims—he has a very similar story to Gulet Mohamed. He claims that while he was being interrogated, there was someone in the room who he believed to be an American agent or a non-U.A.E. national who was sort of, you know, overseeing the whole operation. And he was investigated by the FBI, but he—back in the States, but he was never charged with anything. And he was eventually released by the U.A.E., and he now lives in Lebanon.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, some Democrats who have supported this bill have claimed that it doesn’t really add any new powers above existing law. Could you talk about this issue of existing law?

NICKBAUMANN: OK. So, there are a couple provisions in there that say, you know, we’re just codifying existing law. But the issue is that that really matters, when you take something that is previously the Bush administration’s or the Obama administration’s interpretations of its war powers and you turn that into actual legislated and passed law. That serves as a signal to judges about how they should interpret previous laws, how they should interpret what the executive branch is claiming it has the power to do. And, you know, it really has a broad effect.

AMYGOODMAN: I just want to understand this, Nick. Are you talking about American citizens—in the examples we just talked about, in Gulet or the case of Naji Hamdan, these are Americans who went abroad. And you keep talking about the script that’s followed when they’re picked up. They might first be questioned by FBI, perhaps here. They go abroad. Then they’re questioned by local security forces with information that they only could have gotten, the local security forces, from the United States. Are you saying, in this bill, that Americans could be picked up here and sent to another country?

NICKBAUMANN: I think that there is a lot of evidence that that could happen. Obviously, the government isn’t currently in the business of doing this. And if someone was arrested in the U.S. and sent to another country, it would presumably raise an outcry. But you can imagine circumstances where, for example, someone is arrested in Yemen by U.S. forces and then handed over to local security forces. And this definitely makes that easier.

AMYGOODMAN: And talk about the longstanding, but undisclosed, program, until now, the kind of reporting you’ve been doing about what the U.S. does and what they’re starting to admit.

NICKBAUMANN: OK. So, this program is sort of different from the—from having the U.S. pick up people itself and transfer to another country. The program I’ve been writing about, which is sometimes referred to as proxy detention, is when local authorities sort of pick up someone at the behest of or with the encouragement of the United States, and someone who’s a U.S. citizen. And you see this increasingly over the past five years, but it’s really been happening since at least the Bush administration, perhaps earlier. And basically, the FBI, over the world, has relationships with local law enforcement, local security forces, and they have officer FBI agents in those countries, sort of senior FBI agents, called legal attachés, who coordinate with local forces. And if there’s someone who’s traveling in that country who they believe is a terrorist threat, even if that person is an American, they are going to, you know, suggest or hint to the local forces that it might be in their interest to pick this person up.

AMYGOODMAN: And even if they’re questioned and picked up and finally released, and they’re picked up and they’re questioned with information that’s coming from the United States, they might be put on a no-fly list, and so they can’t come back?

NICKBAUMANN: Yeah, this is very common. There’s an even broader universe of people—and there’s actually an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit about this right now—who are prevented from returning to the U.S., unless they cooperate with FBI questioning, because they’re on the no-fly list. And people have argued that that’s unconstitutional, because one of the most fundamental rights of an American citizen is to be in America, to return to America. And all the Supreme Court justices have agreed on that in previous rulings, so I think they have a pretty good chance in court. The important thing about this proxy detention bit is that the FBI did acknowledge to me that it does sort of have these relationships with foreign governments and that it does at times submit questions and receive answers about people who are being interrogated in foreign custody. So this coordination really does exist.

JUANGONZALEZ: And Nick, this announcement by Attorney General Holder that the President will sign the bill with a signing statement—now, it’s hard to predict what the signing statement might be, but were you surprised by that particular aspect of the announcement? Because everyone expected him to sign the bill. And what do you think could be some of the areas that he might touch on in that signing statement?

NICKBAUMANN: So, I wasn’t that surprised by the signing statement, because President Obama has used signing statements in the past, especially with regards to defense authorization bills. I believe he used one on the previous defense authorization bill, because there are some transfer restrictions regarding Guantánamo detainees. But the administration’s big concern is they don’t want anything in the bill to sort of infringe on their ability to do what they want with regards to prosecuting the war on terror. I don’t think that they are particularly concerned about, you know, these allegations that could allow for indefinite detention or rendition. I think they want as much flexibility as possible, and the signing statement will probably be directed in that way, to say, you know, "We’re going to interpret this to give us a broad—a broad mandate to prosecute the war on terror." So, civil libertarians shouldn’t get their hopes up about that signing statement in any way. I have learned—I learned last night that the bill hasn’t actually been physically sent to Obama for signature yet, so, you know, they could still make some enrollment corrections to the bill, and then we’ll see what happens. I’ve also asked the White House repeatedly what the schedule for signing the bill is, and they haven’t responded. And I don’t believe anyone else has reported when he plans to sign it.

AMYGOODMAN: Nick Baumann, I want to thank you for being with us, reporter at Mother Jones magazine, covers national politics and civil liberties issues. We will link to your reports at democracynow.org. When we come back, we’re going to Arizona to talk about a scathing report that’s just been issued by the Justice Department around Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Stay with us.

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Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500Discovered Files Show U.S., Britain Had Extensive Ties with Gaddafi Regime on Rendition, Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/7/discovered_files_show_us_britain_had
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-07:en/story/8883cd AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the line in Tripoli with Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch. He&#8217;s the emergencies director. He&#8217;s in the capital of Libya. Let&#8217;s talk about these latest revelations, Peter. How did you uncover these hundreds of letters in the Libyan foreign ministry proving the Gaddafi regime has been working for years with the CIA in the United States, with MI6, British intelligence, in Britain?
PETER BOUCKAERT : Well, we were going around about four, five days ago to the different intelligence headquarters in Tripoli to see what the state of their archives was and to make sure that they were not destroyed or looted, as had happened in other cities, because they do contain a lot of important evidence. So I went to the Libyan spy agency, the external intelligence building. I was the first foreigner to arrive there, and spent about five or six hours going through their archives, looking for information about the rendition program. And we stumbled upon a set of several files in a room relating to the CIA renditions and the U.K. relationship, as well, with Musa Kusa, the spy chief. There were many, many more documents there, but we focused mostly on those, just because once we started reading them, we were stunned by the closeness of the relationship between Musa Kusa and both the CIA and the MI6, the heads of clandestine services.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain everything, or as much as you can, of what you saw. Start with the CIA and exactly the relationship and how far back it went, that you could see in these documents, with Gaddafi.
PETER BOUCKAERT : Well, the documents that we found date mostly from a period in 2003 and 2004, when the CIA and MI6 were dismantling Gaddafi&#8217;s weapons of mass destruction program and reestablishing their intelligence relationship with the Libyan government. But we found many documents relating to the rendition and—to the capture and rendition of Islamist suspects abroad. The CIA was offering to capture and render Libyan Islamists to the Gaddafi government. And then they were sending the questions they wanted to be asked to the Gaddafi government.
We also found many documents which just show how close their relationship was. And one of the documents I found is a fax dated Christmas Day 2003, in which the head of MI6 clandestine services—it starts, &quot;Dear Musa,&quot; and then expresses regret that Musa is not joining him for Christmas lunch. And it&#8217;s signed, &quot;Your friend,&quot; and then the name of this person. It just shows a relationship which went way beyond the professional into the intimate, really, with a man who is known for his brutality and his direct role in repression, a man who probably knows a lot more about the Lockerbie bombing and other dark chapters in Libyan history than anybody else.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Why was it—is it the case, Peter, that in Libya it was more shocking, this extraordinary rendition program, than, for example, elsewhere in the region?
PETER BOUCKAERT : Well, the Libyan government is known for its brutality, and the people who were rendered, we went to visit many of them in 2008 in Abu Salim. And they talked about the torture they have suffered. But we should remember that the United States continues to remain in close touch with similar abuses by agencies. They certainly have a similarly close relationship with the Egyptians, with the Yemens, with the Jordanians, and for many years with the Uzbeks, using them to debrief people that they have captured and rendered, under torture. So it&#8217;s not a unique situation in Libya. It&#8217;s just that because of the fall of Tripoli, we were able to gain access to documents that the CIA and the MI6 certainly would rather keep in the dark, where they belong.
AMY GOODMAN : Peter, before we turn to Gareth Peirce, I wanted to ask you specifically about Abdullah Kanchil, the rebel negotiator, head of the [ NTC ], the National Transition Committee negotiating team. How did he end up being brought back to Libya?
PETER BOUCKAERT : I&#8217;m not—are you talking about [Abdelhakim] Belhaj, the Tripoli chief?
AMY GOODMAN : Ah, yes, yes.
PETER BOUCKAERT : Yes. So, Belhaj became the commander of the fighters in Tripoli and is now the chief of the fighters in Tripoli because of the important role he played in the fighting. He is a person who, in the past, has received military training in Afghanistan. So he and his fighters led the battle for Tripoli.
I think it is important to note that he and many other members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group have renounced terrorism a long time ago and have renounced their previous relationship with al-Qaeda. I met Belhaj a few days ago, after we found his own rendition document. And he expressed, in what is in my opinion, a sincere commitment to a new Libya which is democratic and respectful of human rights. And it is important that we try to incorporate people who make that commitment into the new Libya and only exclude those who really have blood on their hands or who have been involved in terrorist activities, not people who just have a conservative Islamist belief.
AMY GOODMAN : Peter Bouckaert, thank you very much for being with us, speaking to us from Tripoli. He&#8217;s Human Rights Watch&#8217;s emergencies director.
As we turn now to Gareth Peirce, one of Britain&#8217;s best-known human rights attorneys. She has represented numerous Guantánamo prisoners. As well, currently she is representing Julian Assange. She is author of a new book, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice .
As you investigate and hear about these hundreds of documents that show the very close relationship between the CIA , MI6 and extraordinary rendition to Libya under Gaddafi, who is well known for torture, what comments do you have, Gareth Peirce? Welcome.
GARETH PEIRCE : It&#8217;s not a surprise that they exist. It&#8217;s important that they&#8217;ve been found, and it&#8217;s extremely important that they be preserved. They confirm what&#8217;s always been known, that the government of this country and these intelligence services, from the beginning, after 9/11, had an intention to present a picture, a narrative, that there was an Islamic worldwide conspiracy—and sadly, a false narrative—that brought in every resistance movement, every legitimate resistance movement suffering under dictators such as Gaddafi. And part of that narrative, in relation to Libya, has in fact come to fruition now to show its falsity, which is that Gaddafi was indeed a brutal dictator. There was indeed a right and a duty for dissidents to resist. And amongst those dissidents, there were—there was a group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
What is perhaps the logical conclusion of that is the hypocrisy that we now discover, to find that, on the one hand, we were saying here, officially, there is no possibility of deporting dissidents to Libya who have been given sanctuary in the U.K., because it&#8217;s a regime that will torture, at the same time attempting to present a narrative that all those dissidents were linked to al-Qaeda and unlawfully reintroduce internment to lock them up indefinitely without trial, yet, we now discover, simultaneously engineering the rendition of one of the members of that group, Belhaj, to go to Libya to be tortured, which we knew—we knew; it was our state policy that we knew Libya did that to its dissidents—and then to facilitate members of the intelligence services going here to interrogate him, specifically, as I read in yesterday&#8217;s newspaper, he says, to confirm for them that there were links which were always denied between the LIFG and al-Qaeda. And therefore, it looks like a complete construct to achieve evidence for a narrative that the government was determined existed, whether or not it did.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Gareth, in response to Belhaj&#8217;s request or demand for an apology, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Britain was interested—that this was an accusation against the previous government and that Britain was now, in fact, focused on the future of Libya. Could you comment on that?
GARETH PEIRCE : All, sadly, that the coalition government, the new government, has done is to appoint an inquiry into British complicity into torture in the past, but that inquiry isn&#8217;t an open, independent inquiry with an independent judge-led panel. It&#8217;s a Cabinet Office review, which gives the Cabinet Office the ultimate say-so in the evidence produced. It&#8217;s been—it&#8217;s been determined it will be almost entirely in secret, in relation to intelligence services activity. And those who have been tortured, the detainees—it&#8217;s called the Detainee Inquiry—will not have any role to play in it.
It is absolutely critical that this not be put to rest. It&#8217;s critical that, if it&#8217;s investigated, it be done publicly. Every organization in the world that has experience in how to eradicate torture insists upon two essential ingredients: first, that all the data that reveals torture is publicly known and understood; and secondly, that those on whose watch it happened, who were responsible, be brought to account. And neither of those preconditions is in existence in the construct that is present in Britain at the moment for investigating complicity, and therefore, what happened to Belhaj is central to understanding. Every bit of it should be made known, for his sake and for the sake of the rest of the world, and for the sake of the future, if we are going to stop this.
And be sure, we&#8217;re still continuing. Even if we are inhibited now in such direct complicity in torture, we are nevertheless, day to day, in contact with, feeding questions to intelligence services, so-called, around the world that are at the behest of regimes whose major interrogation device is torture. This is what we do as part of our daily diplomatic bread and butter for our perceived strategic and economic interests. And we haven&#8217;t stopped. And people are held daily, including British citizens, in arbitrary detention, without access to lawyers. And we do not object. We put our noses in the trough, and we feed from it.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Gareth Peirce, unlike the Cameron administration, the Obama administration says they are unlikely to conduct their own public inquiry. This is from the New York Times , saying that, &quot;Early in his presidency, [President] Obama rejected the idea of a broad inquiry into rendition, torture, secret detention and other reported practices in the American campaign against terrorism, saying he wanted to look forward.&quot; So I wanted to go to one of the British citizens you&#8217;re talking about, your own client, Gareth Peirce, Moazzam Begg, who was held at Guantánamo for more than seven years, a British citizen born and raised in Birmingham. He was seized in February of 2002 by the CIA in Islamabad. We went to London to talk to Moazzam Begg when he was finally released, five years later. He talked about his experience.
MOAZZAM BEGG : So that when I was eventually given into American custody and taken over to Kandahar, the treatment that I received through the processing was probably the most dehumanizing process, I think, that anybody has ever endured in recent times, which included having soldiers sit on me and then many other detainees, several of them pushing down on my head and my legs and my back, ripping open my clothes with a knife, which I could feel slicing, the cold blade against the back of my legs and back, and then photographs being taken of me naked, being shackled, being spat at, photographs of me shaven and unshaven, photographs of soldiers abusing me and other detainees, and derisive remarks about being a terrorist, being a murderer, being Muslim scum, things like this, dogs barking, and then eventually being taken over to an FBI agent who looked rather strange with his FBI cap on, while I’m shivering there naked, and him asking me when was the last time I saw Mullah Omar, when was the last time I saw Osama bin Laden, which was a standard question they asked of every detainee.
AMY GOODMAN : Moazzam Begg was held in U.S. detention for, oh, around seven years, held at Guantánamo for years. Can you talk about what happened to him when he came out, Gareth Peirce—he was never charged with a crime—and why he was taken, what you understood? He said he underwent more than 300 interrogations, not to mention death threats and torture.
GARETH PEIRCE : He&#8217;s one casualty out of, sadly, thousands, tens of thousands, who were viewed in that—what Edward Said rightly condemned as a cartoon-like depiction of the world, of good and evil, the West against Islam, in which there has been, and to a large extent still is not, any comprehension of the plurality, the variety, the richness, the depth of each other&#8217;s entities, either national or as individuals or as groups. And that has persisted, that simplistic view of the world in which the enemy has to be eliminated, the enemy has to be gotten. And if this does just keep going in the way it is, then we will be in perpetual war, not in the quest of perpetual peace, but in terms of hatred and elimination.
And Libya—I don&#8217;t know precisely the reaction in the United States, but in Britain, as with the other uprisings in the Arab world, has been one of surprise as each has happened, and that each has somehow been lit by an unexpected spark in an unexpected tinderbox, without any comprehension that the history of those nations has been one of the worst kind of oppression in which we, as governments, yours and mine, have constantly not just backed the wrong horse—it isn&#8217;t that simplistic a choice—we have backed and encouraged leaders of those countries who have been monsters, who have oppressed their people, and we have categorized the resistance, the dissent, as the enemy, as Islamic extremism, radicalism, that has to be eliminated.
If ever there was a moment for a revolution in our thinking, this is it. We have not understood, for 10 years, much of what the world has been about. We have waged war, and we are continuing to wage endless war in simplistic terms, domestically against our own Muslim citizens, against others, and against huge swaths of countries, now moving, for instance, to the Horn of Africa. We cannot continue in this permanence of combative aggression in our thinking, let alone our actions. And this is an opportunity, I would have thought, that Libya, in what&#8217;s being found there, which is essential historic documentation of how we arrived at this pass—it&#8217;s essential it be grappled with. And if Obama has said no to an inquiry so far, then this is the moment for at least other worldwide organizations—the U.N. Committee Against Torture, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture—all of those organizations to say, &quot;If you, you countries, are not going to have your own inquiries, we are going to have an inquiry, and we are going to investigate. And those countries which have endorsed the right for us to enter and investigate, we&#8217;re going to do so.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Gareth, how would taking on Julian Assange, in these last months, his newest attorney, fit into the work that you&#8217;ve been doing, your human rights work? Can you talk about the latest in his case, as he awaits a judicial decision about whether he will be extradited to Sweden?
GARETH PEIRCE : I&#8217;m sure, as you know, that the element of the case that exists in the English courts, and for which I was asked to represent him, relates to a narrow issue: a request from Sweden to the U.K. I think, in relation to the bigger picture, in fact, just as a personal comment, one could say that WikiLeaks, the whole policy or potential of the right to the world to know, in fact, becomes not irrelevant, but when you can go to the British embassy in Tripoli and find the data, if you can go to Musa Kusa&#8217;s office in Tripoli and find the data, and that that is put out into the open, and we regard it as essential to know, and the world isn&#8217;t falling apart at these revelations, in that sense—embarrassment extreme, I&#8217;m sure—but does anyone contest that having more information isn&#8217;t essential for us to put the world in a better state? I don&#8217;t make an equivalency between every revelation of everything intended to remain secret. I don&#8217;t do that. But I do say knowledge and understanding is essential for the world we inhabit.
AMY GOODMAN : Gareth Peirce, we will leave it there. We thank you so much for being with us, author of Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice . She is one of Britain&#8217;s most well-known human rights attorneys, has represented numerous Guantánamo prisoners, as well as Julian Assange. She was speaking to us from London. AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the line in Tripoli with Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch. He’s the emergencies director. He’s in the capital of Libya. Let’s talk about these latest revelations, Peter. How did you uncover these hundreds of letters in the Libyan foreign ministry proving the Gaddafi regime has been working for years with the CIA in the United States, with MI6, British intelligence, in Britain?

PETERBOUCKAERT: Well, we were going around about four, five days ago to the different intelligence headquarters in Tripoli to see what the state of their archives was and to make sure that they were not destroyed or looted, as had happened in other cities, because they do contain a lot of important evidence. So I went to the Libyan spy agency, the external intelligence building. I was the first foreigner to arrive there, and spent about five or six hours going through their archives, looking for information about the rendition program. And we stumbled upon a set of several files in a room relating to the CIA renditions and the U.K. relationship, as well, with Musa Kusa, the spy chief. There were many, many more documents there, but we focused mostly on those, just because once we started reading them, we were stunned by the closeness of the relationship between Musa Kusa and both the CIA and the MI6, the heads of clandestine services.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain everything, or as much as you can, of what you saw. Start with the CIA and exactly the relationship and how far back it went, that you could see in these documents, with Gaddafi.

PETERBOUCKAERT: Well, the documents that we found date mostly from a period in 2003 and 2004, when the CIA and MI6 were dismantling Gaddafi’s weapons of mass destruction program and reestablishing their intelligence relationship with the Libyan government. But we found many documents relating to the rendition and—to the capture and rendition of Islamist suspects abroad. The CIA was offering to capture and render Libyan Islamists to the Gaddafi government. And then they were sending the questions they wanted to be asked to the Gaddafi government.

We also found many documents which just show how close their relationship was. And one of the documents I found is a fax dated Christmas Day 2003, in which the head of MI6 clandestine services—it starts, "Dear Musa," and then expresses regret that Musa is not joining him for Christmas lunch. And it’s signed, "Your friend," and then the name of this person. It just shows a relationship which went way beyond the professional into the intimate, really, with a man who is known for his brutality and his direct role in repression, a man who probably knows a lot more about the Lockerbie bombing and other dark chapters in Libyan history than anybody else.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Why was it—is it the case, Peter, that in Libya it was more shocking, this extraordinary rendition program, than, for example, elsewhere in the region?

PETERBOUCKAERT: Well, the Libyan government is known for its brutality, and the people who were rendered, we went to visit many of them in 2008 in Abu Salim. And they talked about the torture they have suffered. But we should remember that the United States continues to remain in close touch with similar abuses by agencies. They certainly have a similarly close relationship with the Egyptians, with the Yemens, with the Jordanians, and for many years with the Uzbeks, using them to debrief people that they have captured and rendered, under torture. So it’s not a unique situation in Libya. It’s just that because of the fall of Tripoli, we were able to gain access to documents that the CIA and the MI6 certainly would rather keep in the dark, where they belong.

AMYGOODMAN: Peter, before we turn to Gareth Peirce, I wanted to ask you specifically about Abdullah Kanchil, the rebel negotiator, head of the [NTC], the National Transition Committee negotiating team. How did he end up being brought back to Libya?

PETERBOUCKAERT: Yes. So, Belhaj became the commander of the fighters in Tripoli and is now the chief of the fighters in Tripoli because of the important role he played in the fighting. He is a person who, in the past, has received military training in Afghanistan. So he and his fighters led the battle for Tripoli.

I think it is important to note that he and many other members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group have renounced terrorism a long time ago and have renounced their previous relationship with al-Qaeda. I met Belhaj a few days ago, after we found his own rendition document. And he expressed, in what is in my opinion, a sincere commitment to a new Libya which is democratic and respectful of human rights. And it is important that we try to incorporate people who make that commitment into the new Libya and only exclude those who really have blood on their hands or who have been involved in terrorist activities, not people who just have a conservative Islamist belief.

AMYGOODMAN: Peter Bouckaert, thank you very much for being with us, speaking to us from Tripoli. He’s Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director.

As we turn now to Gareth Peirce, one of Britain’s best-known human rights attorneys. She has represented numerous Guantánamo prisoners. As well, currently she is representing Julian Assange. She is author of a new book, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice.

As you investigate and hear about these hundreds of documents that show the very close relationship between the CIA, MI6 and extraordinary rendition to Libya under Gaddafi, who is well known for torture, what comments do you have, Gareth Peirce? Welcome.

GARETHPEIRCE: It’s not a surprise that they exist. It’s important that they’ve been found, and it’s extremely important that they be preserved. They confirm what’s always been known, that the government of this country and these intelligence services, from the beginning, after 9/11, had an intention to present a picture, a narrative, that there was an Islamic worldwide conspiracy—and sadly, a false narrative—that brought in every resistance movement, every legitimate resistance movement suffering under dictators such as Gaddafi. And part of that narrative, in relation to Libya, has in fact come to fruition now to show its falsity, which is that Gaddafi was indeed a brutal dictator. There was indeed a right and a duty for dissidents to resist. And amongst those dissidents, there were—there was a group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

What is perhaps the logical conclusion of that is the hypocrisy that we now discover, to find that, on the one hand, we were saying here, officially, there is no possibility of deporting dissidents to Libya who have been given sanctuary in the U.K., because it’s a regime that will torture, at the same time attempting to present a narrative that all those dissidents were linked to al-Qaeda and unlawfully reintroduce internment to lock them up indefinitely without trial, yet, we now discover, simultaneously engineering the rendition of one of the members of that group, Belhaj, to go to Libya to be tortured, which we knew—we knew; it was our state policy that we knew Libya did that to its dissidents—and then to facilitate members of the intelligence services going here to interrogate him, specifically, as I read in yesterday’s newspaper, he says, to confirm for them that there were links which were always denied between the LIFG and al-Qaeda. And therefore, it looks like a complete construct to achieve evidence for a narrative that the government was determined existed, whether or not it did.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Gareth, in response to Belhaj’s request or demand for an apology, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Britain was interested—that this was an accusation against the previous government and that Britain was now, in fact, focused on the future of Libya. Could you comment on that?

GARETHPEIRCE: All, sadly, that the coalition government, the new government, has done is to appoint an inquiry into British complicity into torture in the past, but that inquiry isn’t an open, independent inquiry with an independent judge-led panel. It’s a Cabinet Office review, which gives the Cabinet Office the ultimate say-so in the evidence produced. It’s been—it’s been determined it will be almost entirely in secret, in relation to intelligence services activity. And those who have been tortured, the detainees—it’s called the Detainee Inquiry—will not have any role to play in it.

It is absolutely critical that this not be put to rest. It’s critical that, if it’s investigated, it be done publicly. Every organization in the world that has experience in how to eradicate torture insists upon two essential ingredients: first, that all the data that reveals torture is publicly known and understood; and secondly, that those on whose watch it happened, who were responsible, be brought to account. And neither of those preconditions is in existence in the construct that is present in Britain at the moment for investigating complicity, and therefore, what happened to Belhaj is central to understanding. Every bit of it should be made known, for his sake and for the sake of the rest of the world, and for the sake of the future, if we are going to stop this.

And be sure, we’re still continuing. Even if we are inhibited now in such direct complicity in torture, we are nevertheless, day to day, in contact with, feeding questions to intelligence services, so-called, around the world that are at the behest of regimes whose major interrogation device is torture. This is what we do as part of our daily diplomatic bread and butter for our perceived strategic and economic interests. And we haven’t stopped. And people are held daily, including British citizens, in arbitrary detention, without access to lawyers. And we do not object. We put our noses in the trough, and we feed from it.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Gareth Peirce, unlike the Cameron administration, the Obama administration says they are unlikely to conduct their own public inquiry. This is from the New York Times , saying that, "Early in his presidency, [President] Obama rejected the idea of a broad inquiry into rendition, torture, secret detention and other reported practices in the American campaign against terrorism, saying he wanted to look forward." So I wanted to go to one of the British citizens you’re talking about, your own client, Gareth Peirce, Moazzam Begg, who was held at Guantánamo for more than seven years, a British citizen born and raised in Birmingham. He was seized in February of 2002 by the CIA in Islamabad. We went to London to talk to Moazzam Begg when he was finally released, five years later. He talked about his experience.

MOAZZAMBEGG: So that when I was eventually given into American custody and taken over to Kandahar, the treatment that I received through the processing was probably the most dehumanizing process, I think, that anybody has ever endured in recent times, which included having soldiers sit on me and then many other detainees, several of them pushing down on my head and my legs and my back, ripping open my clothes with a knife, which I could feel slicing, the cold blade against the back of my legs and back, and then photographs being taken of me naked, being shackled, being spat at, photographs of me shaven and unshaven, photographs of soldiers abusing me and other detainees, and derisive remarks about being a terrorist, being a murderer, being Muslim scum, things like this, dogs barking, and then eventually being taken over to an FBI agent who looked rather strange with his FBI cap on, while I’m shivering there naked, and him asking me when was the last time I saw Mullah Omar, when was the last time I saw Osama bin Laden, which was a standard question they asked of every detainee.

AMYGOODMAN: Moazzam Begg was held in U.S. detention for, oh, around seven years, held at Guantánamo for years. Can you talk about what happened to him when he came out, Gareth Peirce—he was never charged with a crime—and why he was taken, what you understood? He said he underwent more than 300 interrogations, not to mention death threats and torture.

GARETHPEIRCE: He’s one casualty out of, sadly, thousands, tens of thousands, who were viewed in that—what Edward Said rightly condemned as a cartoon-like depiction of the world, of good and evil, the West against Islam, in which there has been, and to a large extent still is not, any comprehension of the plurality, the variety, the richness, the depth of each other’s entities, either national or as individuals or as groups. And that has persisted, that simplistic view of the world in which the enemy has to be eliminated, the enemy has to be gotten. And if this does just keep going in the way it is, then we will be in perpetual war, not in the quest of perpetual peace, but in terms of hatred and elimination.

And Libya—I don’t know precisely the reaction in the United States, but in Britain, as with the other uprisings in the Arab world, has been one of surprise as each has happened, and that each has somehow been lit by an unexpected spark in an unexpected tinderbox, without any comprehension that the history of those nations has been one of the worst kind of oppression in which we, as governments, yours and mine, have constantly not just backed the wrong horse—it isn’t that simplistic a choice—we have backed and encouraged leaders of those countries who have been monsters, who have oppressed their people, and we have categorized the resistance, the dissent, as the enemy, as Islamic extremism, radicalism, that has to be eliminated.

If ever there was a moment for a revolution in our thinking, this is it. We have not understood, for 10 years, much of what the world has been about. We have waged war, and we are continuing to wage endless war in simplistic terms, domestically against our own Muslim citizens, against others, and against huge swaths of countries, now moving, for instance, to the Horn of Africa. We cannot continue in this permanence of combative aggression in our thinking, let alone our actions. And this is an opportunity, I would have thought, that Libya, in what’s being found there, which is essential historic documentation of how we arrived at this pass—it’s essential it be grappled with. And if Obama has said no to an inquiry so far, then this is the moment for at least other worldwide organizations—the U.N. Committee Against Torture, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture—all of those organizations to say, "If you, you countries, are not going to have your own inquiries, we are going to have an inquiry, and we are going to investigate. And those countries which have endorsed the right for us to enter and investigate, we’re going to do so."

AMYGOODMAN: Gareth, how would taking on Julian Assange, in these last months, his newest attorney, fit into the work that you’ve been doing, your human rights work? Can you talk about the latest in his case, as he awaits a judicial decision about whether he will be extradited to Sweden?

GARETHPEIRCE: I’m sure, as you know, that the element of the case that exists in the English courts, and for which I was asked to represent him, relates to a narrow issue: a request from Sweden to the U.K. I think, in relation to the bigger picture, in fact, just as a personal comment, one could say that WikiLeaks, the whole policy or potential of the right to the world to know, in fact, becomes not irrelevant, but when you can go to the British embassy in Tripoli and find the data, if you can go to Musa Kusa’s office in Tripoli and find the data, and that that is put out into the open, and we regard it as essential to know, and the world isn’t falling apart at these revelations, in that sense—embarrassment extreme, I’m sure—but does anyone contest that having more information isn’t essential for us to put the world in a better state? I don’t make an equivalency between every revelation of everything intended to remain secret. I don’t do that. But I do say knowledge and understanding is essential for the world we inhabit.

AMYGOODMAN: Gareth Peirce, we will leave it there. We thank you so much for being with us, author of Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice. She is one of Britain’s most well-known human rights attorneys, has represented numerous Guantánamo prisoners, as well as Julian Assange. She was speaking to us from London.

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Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400A Debate on Human Rights Watch's Call for Bush Administration Officials to be Tried for Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/12/a_debate_on_human_rights_watchs
tag:democracynow.org,2011-07-12:en/story/3e1e41 AMY GOODMAN : Human Rights Watch has released a major new report calling on the U.S. government to launch a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes of torture committed by former President George W. Bush and other top officials under his administration. It comes on the heels of a Justice Department investigation into alleged torture, abuse and murder during the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced it would launch a full criminal investigation into the deaths of just two prisoners out of 101 cases under review, including one who died at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Human Rights Watch&#8217;s 107-page report urges a probe of all officials responsible for implementing practices such as waterboarding, the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. The Obama administration has declared waterboarding a form of torture and banned its use since taking office, but has not prosecuted any Bush administration officials to date. Shortly after he took office, Obama was asked if he supported prosecutions for Bush-era torture.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Nobody is above the law. And if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen—but that, generally speaking, I&#8217;m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
AMY GOODMAN : That was President Obama speaking in 2009. The new Human Rights Watch report says the Obama administration has failed to meet U.S. obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill treatment of prisoners. It also notes former President George W. Bush has admitted he personally approved the waterboarding of the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In an interview on The Daily Show in 2010, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo told Jon Stewart he does not believe the Bush administration made any mistakes.
JON STEWART : Did Bush make a mistake in pursuing, perhaps, inhumane treatment of combatants, that if our soldiers were treated similarly, we would be outraged?
JOHN YOO : Look, I don&#8217;t think that they made a mistake in deciding to go beyond the law enforcement paradigm, because it was an unconventional, unprecedented type of war. You&#8217;re quite right to say, oh, well, there&#8217;s a war sometimes—
JON STEWART : How is terrorism—but how is terrorism unprecedented?
JOHN YOO : Because we were attacked for the first time by a non-state group.
JON STEWART : In the 1930s, we had anarchists bomb government buildings.
JOHN YOO : They didn&#8217;t blow up and kill 3,000 people in New York City, either. They didn&#8217;t destroy the World Trade Center and try to decapitate the government, either.
AMY GOODMAN : That was former Justice Department attorney John Yoo.
In addition to calling for an investigation at home, Human Rights Watch says other countries should prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. government does not pursue credible criminal probes. The report also details how WikiLeaks diplomatic cables reveal that U.S. officials have previously sought to curtail such investigations, as in the case of Spanish prosecutors pursuing a case against former top U.S. officials who authorized the use of torture.
For more, we&#8217;re joined here in New York by Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. And we&#8217;re joined in Louisiana by John Baker, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School. He&#8217;s joining us from Baton Rouge from the PBS station WLPB .
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Lay out the findings further, Ken, in your report.
KENNETH ROTH : Well, we, first of all, begin by adding up all of the evidence that particularly the senior Bush officials ordered torture. And we look, for example, to the admissions that you mentioned of President Bush. There&#8217;s a similar admission in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld&#8217;s memoir. And there&#8217;s considerable evidence that people like George Tenet or Dick Cheney presided over the so-called principals meetings, where the interrogation policy was decided. So we&#8217;re not focusing primarily on the lower-level interrogators, but rather on the senior officials who ordered torture.
And what led us to issue the report now is that despite this considerable evidence, the Obama administration has done virtually nothing to pursue these serious crimes. The investigation that you just mentioned, the John Durham investigation, looked only at unauthorized torture—that is, people who exceeded their orders. But the problem was not the occasional interrogator who, in an excess of enthusiasm, went beyond the orders. The problem was the orders themselves. They allowed things like waterboarding, which was—is basically mock execution by drowning, a paradigmatic form of torture. And to exempt those kinds of extreme interrogation practices, just because some senior Bush official ordered them, is wrong. It&#8217;s a dereliction of President Obama&#8217;s responsibility to enforce the criminal law that he basically has, as you saw in the clip, said he will look forward, not back. He will stop torture by U.S. interrogators from now on, or really from the beginning of his administration, but he will not look at the torture of the Bush officials. And that really, in a sense—it abandons his duty as what you might call the prosecutor-in-chief to not simply abide by the criminal law, but to enforce it, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor John Baker, your response?
JOHN BAKER : Well, first of all, there&#8217;s no definition of &quot;torture.&quot; I mean, the throwing around of the word &quot;torture&quot; has been the problem in this whole thing. And there has not been the case made this morning that distinguishes what really is torture from broad accusations that they ordered torture. When you read those memos, much criticized by the antiwar left, you see that there was a serious attempt—you can disagree with it, but a serious attempt—to look at what the law was and to give legal guidance on that. That&#8217;s unprecedented. Other countries don&#8217;t do this. We take seriously our obligations.
And the idea that we would go and prosecute senior officials, the President and others, is simply beyond anything we&#8217;ve ever done in this country, and there&#8217;s no basis for it. I mean, if we&#8217;re going to have a situation where every time we have a change of party in the White House, that the new administration prosecutes the former administration, then we really are going down the path of some third-world countries. I mean, one can make a case against President Obama, for instance, that the use of drones to kill enemy—enemies in other countries is unnecessary, that instead we could capture them, and that he has gone well beyond self-defense. One can make that case. I&#8217;m not going to make it, but one can make it. I don&#8217;t want a future administration under Republicans coming in and talking about prosecuting Attorney General Holder or President Obama. I don&#8217;t think that that is healthy.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth? Let&#8217;s get Ken Roth to respond.
JOHN BAKER : And I don&#8217;t think it is justified.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth?
KENNETH ROTH : All right. Well, first, with all due respect to Professor Baker, there is a definition of torture. It&#8217;s contained in the torture convention, which, Amy, you mentioned at the outset, an international treaty that the United States and 140-some other governments have ratified. And it says that torture is the intentional infliction of severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental. The kinds of techniques that we&#8217;re talking about clearly fall under that definition. A mock execution is a paradigmatic form of psychological torture. Everybody understands that. The U.S. has prosecuted others for engaging in that. That&#8217;s what waterboarding is. It&#8217;s mock execution by drowning. Similarly, imposing these painful stress positions on people for long periods, subjecting them to prolonged sleep deprivation, to extremes of hot and cold, to beating and the like, these are all classic forms of torture. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s really in dispute.
So, the real issue is, did the officials who ordered that kind of torture—should they be exempted just because they were members of the prior administration? Now, Professor Baker seems to say that it somehow—it politicizes the criminal law for one president to hold another to that law, to prosecute clear transgressions of the law. I don&#8217;t buy that. I think, and I think most Americans feel, that this nation is a nation of laws and that their politicians and government officials should not be exempt from that view. Now, obviously, there were some who took different points of view. President Nixon notoriously saw himself as the president and therefore above the law. But he was hounded from office. I don&#8217;t think anyone thinks that when an official like Bush or Cheney, Rumsfeld or Tenet commits serious violations of law by ordering the criminal act of torture, that simply because they were a senior official, they should be exempted.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to one of the key pieces of evidence against former President George W. Bush, has been his own words. This was an interview he did last November with NBC&#8217;s Matt Lauer, in which President Bush openly admitted authorizing the use of torture on prisoners.
MATT LAUER : Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
GEORGE W. BUSH : Because the lawyers said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer. And—but you got to trust the judgment of people around you. And I do.
MATT LAUER : You say it’s legal, and the lawyers told me.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Yeah.
MATT LAUER : Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Well—
MATT LAUER : Tom Kean, who was the former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Well, he obviously doesn’t know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That’s why I’ve written the book. He can—they can draw whatever conclusion they want.
MATT LAUER : If it’s legal, President Bush, then if an American is taken into custody in a foreign country, not necessarily a uniformed American—
GEORGE W. BUSH : Look, I’m not going to debate the issue, Matt. I really—
MATT LAUER : I’m just asking. Would it be OK for a foreign country to waterboard an American citizen?
GEORGE W. BUSH : It’s—all I ask is that people read the book. And they can reach the same conclusion if they would have made the same decision I made or not.
MATT LAUER : You’d make the same decision again today?
GEORGE W. BUSH : Yeah, I would.
AMY GOODMAN : That was George W. Bush speaking to Matt Lauer. Ken Roth?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, I mean, first of all, Matt was absolutely correct to point to these legal opinions, because the Bush administration basically shopped around for the right legal opinion. They went down the hierarchy in the Justice Department. They found a very acquiescent individual, John Yoo, who wrote a memo, which if you read that memo, this is not an honest assessment of the law. This is a very partisan analysis designed to legalize something that&#8217;s illegal.
Now, for the President then to say, &quot;Oh, well, my lawyer said it was legal, therefore I can do it,&quot; that&#8217;s completely disingenuous. It&#8217;s one thing for a sort of a low-level interrogator, who may not know the origins of a legal memo, to rely on it. But for the President, for Cheney, who put pressure on the various lawyers to approve the torture, who chose the authors of these memos, to then rely on this legal opinion, that&#8217;s basically just, you know, turning lawyers into members of the criminal conspiracy. That should not be grounds for any kind of defense to charges of torture.
AMY GOODMAN : By the way, we did invite Professor Yoo, now a law professor at University of California, Berkeley, to be on the broadcast, but he declined our request. Professor John Baker, your response to what Kenneth Roth has just said?
JOHN BAKER : Well, first of all, Amy, did you notice how you biased the statement? You said that President Bush admitted that he ordered torture. He never made such a statement at all. What you&#8217;ve done is to leap from what he said, and you labeled it torture. The reality is, if you read those memos—and the thing that is being lost here is that if you are going to turn war into a criminal process, then you at least ought to pay attention to criminal law. Now, there&#8217;s been no mention here that the essence of crime is specific intent. And the reason I&#8217;m focusing on the definition of torture is because that is in the statutory definition. There has to be specific intent to inflict this serious harm. And the memos go through it in great detail as to whether or not such and such is a serious harm and whether there is specific intent. Secondly, completely lost in this is the defense of self-defense and defense of others. That affects the definition of torture.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth.
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, well, on this argument of self-defense, again, with all due respect to Professor Baker, I would urge him to read the definition of the crime, because the crime focuses—
JOHN BAKER : I have. I have, believe me.
KENNETH ROTH : —on the intentional infliction—let me finish, please. The crime focuses on the intentional infliction—
JOHN BAKER : No, it&#8217;s specific intent. It&#8217;s not just intentional.
KENNETH ROTH : —of severe pain or suffering. It doesn&#8217;t say it&#8217;s OK to impose severe pain if you have a good reason. It says, for whatever reason, if you impose that pain, it is a crime. So, you know, by Professor Baker&#8217;s view, if the interrogators were defending America, they could, you know, severely beat someone, they could rape the person, they can mutilate them. They could do whatever they wanted, because it was for a good cause: it was for self-defense. That&#8217;s not the law. The law prohibits the intentional infliction of pain or suffering in severe forms, regardless of the reason.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go back to John Yoo, the former Justice Department—
JOHN BAKER : Look, you don&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : —attorney. John Baker—
JOHN BAKER : Could I come back in here, please?
AMY GOODMAN : Yeah, go ahead, for a quick second.
JOHN BAKER : Could I come back in here? Look, he simply doesn&#8217;t understand criminal law, because when you define a crime, it is not complete in its definition until you consider the defenses. So his narrowing of the definition is simply wrong. You know, I don&#8217;t know whether you teach criminal law, but you have to consider the defenses. And the definition of killing of another human being, of murder, depending on how you draft it, you don&#8217;t exclude the defenses. So, if you have a criminal code, which we don&#8217;t have at the federal level, what you do is you consider the offense, and you also consider the defenses. And what you&#8217;re doing is eliminating the defense. You&#8217;re saying that we can&#8217;t act in a legitimate way, even using force, to defend ourselves. And that is a completely absurd position.
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, let me just address that, because, first of all, Professor Baker, please don&#8217;t lecture me on criminal law. I was a federal prosecutor for five years in New York and Washington. I know exactly what I&#8217;m talking about. If the law were, as you say it is—
JOHN BAKER : Well, then you know what I&#8217;m talking about, that you can&#8217;t ignore the defenses.
KENNETH ROTH : Let me finish. If the law were as you said it was, as long as the war were fought for defensive purposes, you would throw the Geneva Conventions out the door. You could do anything. You could mutilate prisoners. You could rape them. You could do whatever you want, as long as it was in self-defense. Believe me, that is not the law.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to former Justice Department attorney John Yoo—
JOHN BAKER : That is not what—that—
AMY GOODMAN : —who defended his role in drafting the Bush administration torture memos. As I said, we did invite him on the show. He declined, but he did have a debate with you, Ken Roth, on the Charlie Rose show, where he defended the use of aggressive interrogation techniques.
JOHN YOO : The laws of war are enforced. You know, the laws of war, where we treat each other&#8217;s soldiers, give them prisoner of war status and so on, are enforced by reciprocal treatment. And that&#8217;s the idea that if we treat them—
CHARLIE ROSE : But that&#8217;s when you have two nation states.
JOHN YOO : I know. Yeah, exactly. And so, that&#8217;s the problem, is that we are fighting an enemy that is not a nation state, either in Iraq with the insurgency or al-Qaeda throughout the world. They do not provide people with POW treatment. They don&#8217;t have POW bases. As far as we can tell, they don&#8217;t take prisoners, or they behead prisoners. And so, the question is, what is the benefit that we&#8217;re getting, in this particular war, by providing POW treatment or providing them with the kind of treatment we usually reserve for nation state regular armed forces, when if you use this other standard that we can give them under the law, we have the possibility of getting more information through aggressive interrogation techniques that could stop a future attack on the United States?
CHARLIE ROSE : What&#8217;s the answer?
AMY GOODMAN : In the same interview, Yoo claimed Israel had decreased suicide attacks by using enhanced interrogation techniques.
JOHN YOO : The Israeli commission found that the use of these kind of aggressive interrogation techniques went broader than it was authorized for. They also found that a number—a high percentage of suicide bombers are stopped by information gathered from these kind of interrogations.
AMY GOODMAN : Kenneth Roth, your response to John Yoo&#8217;s assertions that America&#8217;s enemies are not nation states, so they&#8217;re not entitled to certain protections, and the assertion that torture ultimately works?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, John Yoo was confusing two different issues. He refers to prisoner of war status, which indeed is reserved for conflicts between governments that respect the Geneva Conventions. But the prohibition on torture transcends that. That applies to any prisoner, whether a POW or a terrorist. If you&#8217;re in war or, for that matter, if it&#8217;s a regular criminal matter, no one can be tortured. There is—it is an absolute prohibition that has nothing to do with reciprocity.
Now, as to the argument that torture works, I mean, we heard this most recently with bin Laden&#8217;s killing. You know, Cheney got on the air and said, &quot;Aha! It was because of the enhanced interrogation techniques.&quot; But if you look closely even at what Cheney says, he never claims that it was the torture or the enhanced interrogation technique that produced the information. He would say, you know, prisoners who had been subject to this helped in the capture of bin Laden. And indeed, when you start looking more closely at the evidence, it turns out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who of course was tortured 183 times under waterboarding, he lied about the key courier who ended up leading to bin Laden. So, even somebody who was subjected to these extreme forms of torture didn&#8217;t fess up the truth about what was going on. And if you talk to the professional interrogators, they will say that it&#8217;s far more effective to build a rapport with a person under interrogation and that that kind of voluntary cooperation is a much more valuable form to—of cracking these secretive criminal conspiracies than twisting somebody&#8217;s arm or subjecting them to waterboarding.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor John Baker?
JOHN BAKER : Well, on the first point, I agree with Mr. Roth that there is certainly a difference between the treatment accorded under a treaty as opposed to the torture provisions in our statute and well as the convention. And yes, there is a prohibition against torture of anybody. But again, we come back to what is torture. And Mr. Roth simply took the argument and expanded it. I&#8217;ve never argued that it is a general defense for everything. As Mr. Roth should know, if he was a former prosecutor, then when we look at self-defense or defense of others, it always depends on the particular circumstances. And if you read those memos, the circumstances were laid out. And carefully in the memos, they say, assuming that these are the facts and that these are only the facts and there aren&#8217;t any other facts, as the facts change, then it&#8217;s different. So, contrary to what Mr. Roth says and what many law professors believe, many who haven&#8217;t read this stuff or who don&#8217;t teach criminal law, there is a plausible argument in these memos. You may disagree with the argument. Lawyers disagree on all kinds of things. But to simply blanket and say that this was clearly torture, to me, is nonsense. It&#8217;s simply not good legal argument.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth, I wanted to follow up on another point in your report, encouraging other countries to prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. is not going to prosecute their own.
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, well, this is a serious problem. The United States regularly pushes other governments to prosecute their torturers, their war criminals. But when the U.S., as, you know, perhaps the most visible nation in the world, doesn&#8217;t abide by that same standard, it not only undermines U.S. credibility as a proponent of enforcing international human rights law, but it also sets a very visible negative example. I had this experience. I met a couple of years ago with the Egyptian prime minister at a point where we had just received evidence that a bunch of suspects, terrorism suspects, had been picked up and were being tortured. And I met with him in his office, and I pressed him to stop it. And without skipping a beat, he looked at me and said, &quot;Well, that&#8217;s what Bush does.&quot; And now, that&#8217;s a cheap answer. We all know that. But it&#8217;s a politically effective answer. If a government as powerful as the United States is flouting its obligations to prosecute torturers, why do we expect anybody else to do that?
AMY GOODMAN : Should it be taken to the ICC , the International Criminal Court?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, you know, unfortunately, the International Criminal Court doesn&#8217;t have jurisdiction over most of these cases. The only way it could get jurisdiction would be for the U.N. Security Council to hand it jurisdiction, and that&#8217;s not going to happen with the U.S. sitting there and exercising its veto. So, as a practical matter, I mean, we have a strong preference for domestic prosecutions. I think for Obama to live up to his obligation as prosecutor-in-chief and to authorize Attorney General Eric Holder to pursue these investigations, that would be the preferred model. But if that doesn&#8217;t work, the only real alternative is for other governments to prosecute under their power of universal jurisdiction. This is what Spain tried to do, and the Obama administration stepped in and stopped them.
AMY GOODMAN : And we know that from the WikiLeaks documents—
KENNETH ROTH : Precisely.
AMY GOODMAN : —that trove of documents that are slowly being released. Julian Assange, as we speak, is in court. The significance of WikiLeaks for Human Rights Watch and gathering information, can you talk about that?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, I have to say, the massive WikiLeaks leak largely confirmed what we already knew. I mean, it was, you know, I suppose, surprising to see that these State Department memos were reasonably well written. They were insightful. Their analysis wasn&#8217;t that far off from the analysis that Human Rights Watch researchers on the ground were providing. So, I didn&#8217;t see any great insights provided by the vast bulk of those documents, other than a kind of reconfirmation that the U.S. embassies are sort of seeing things as we see them. And the real issue is, what do they do about it? Sometimes they are pushing to protect human rights, but too often they&#8217;re not.
AMY GOODMAN : Final word, Professor Baker?
JOHN BAKER : Well, a couple of things. First of all, as to foreign leaders accusing us of ignoring torturers because people like Mr. Roth are accusing people in the United States of torture, when in fact the issue is whether there was or wasn&#8217;t torture. Secondly, this idea of universal jurisdiction in international law is highly controversial. Indeed, if there is universal jurisdiction, then there&#8217;s nothing left to sovereignty. If every country can extend its police powers beyond its borders, that&#8217;s a prescription not only for chaos; it&#8217;s actually a prescription for war.
AMY GOODMAN : Final question from what Professor Baker said, and this is to Ken Roth, when he said, well, then you should be looking at President Obama, their drone attacks killing civilians in Pakistan. What about that?
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, well, the drone attacks, the Obama administration says, are attacks on combatants. In war, you can shoot at the other side&#8217;s combatants. It&#8217;s very different from torturing somebody in custody. Now, Professor Baker says, oh, maybe there&#8217;s a self-defense argument. Let me say that there really isn&#8217;t, under any reasonable definition. But, you know, let&#8217;s bring that to a jury. The evidence is overwhelming that senior Bush officials authorized torture, more than enough for Eric Holder to prosecute, if Obama would just let him do that. He should.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;ll leave it there. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Professor John Baker, of Louisiana State University Law School, professor emeritus there. AMYGOODMAN: Human Rights Watch has released a major new report calling on the U.S. government to launch a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes of torture committed by former President George W. Bush and other top officials under his administration. It comes on the heels of a Justice Department investigation into alleged torture, abuse and murder during the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced it would launch a full criminal investigation into the deaths of just two prisoners out of 101 cases under review, including one who died at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Human Rights Watch’s 107-page report urges a probe of all officials responsible for implementing practices such as waterboarding, the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. The Obama administration has declared waterboarding a form of torture and banned its use since taking office, but has not prosecuted any Bush administration officials to date. Shortly after he took office, Obama was asked if he supported prosecutions for Bush-era torture.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Nobody is above the law. And if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen—but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

AMYGOODMAN: That was President Obama speaking in 2009. The new Human Rights Watch report says the Obama administration has failed to meet U.S. obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill treatment of prisoners. It also notes former President George W. Bush has admitted he personally approved the waterboarding of the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In an interview on The Daily Show in 2010, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo told Jon Stewart he does not believe the Bush administration made any mistakes.

JONSTEWART: Did Bush make a mistake in pursuing, perhaps, inhumane treatment of combatants, that if our soldiers were treated similarly, we would be outraged?

JOHNYOO: Look, I don’t think that they made a mistake in deciding to go beyond the law enforcement paradigm, because it was an unconventional, unprecedented type of war. You’re quite right to say, oh, well, there’s a war sometimes—

JONSTEWART: How is terrorism—but how is terrorism unprecedented?

JOHNYOO: Because we were attacked for the first time by a non-state group.

JONSTEWART: In the 1930s, we had anarchists bomb government buildings.

JOHNYOO: They didn’t blow up and kill 3,000 people in New York City, either. They didn’t destroy the World Trade Center and try to decapitate the government, either.

AMYGOODMAN: That was former Justice Department attorney John Yoo.

In addition to calling for an investigation at home, Human Rights Watch says other countries should prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. government does not pursue credible criminal probes. The report also details how WikiLeaks diplomatic cables reveal that U.S. officials have previously sought to curtail such investigations, as in the case of Spanish prosecutors pursuing a case against former top U.S. officials who authorized the use of torture.

For more, we’re joined here in New York by Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. And we’re joined in Louisiana by John Baker, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School. He’s joining us from Baton Rouge from the PBS station WLPB.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Lay out the findings further, Ken, in your report.

KENNETHROTH: Well, we, first of all, begin by adding up all of the evidence that particularly the senior Bush officials ordered torture. And we look, for example, to the admissions that you mentioned of President Bush. There’s a similar admission in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. And there’s considerable evidence that people like George Tenet or Dick Cheney presided over the so-called principals meetings, where the interrogation policy was decided. So we’re not focusing primarily on the lower-level interrogators, but rather on the senior officials who ordered torture.

And what led us to issue the report now is that despite this considerable evidence, the Obama administration has done virtually nothing to pursue these serious crimes. The investigation that you just mentioned, the John Durham investigation, looked only at unauthorized torture—that is, people who exceeded their orders. But the problem was not the occasional interrogator who, in an excess of enthusiasm, went beyond the orders. The problem was the orders themselves. They allowed things like waterboarding, which was—is basically mock execution by drowning, a paradigmatic form of torture. And to exempt those kinds of extreme interrogation practices, just because some senior Bush official ordered them, is wrong. It’s a dereliction of President Obama’s responsibility to enforce the criminal law that he basically has, as you saw in the clip, said he will look forward, not back. He will stop torture by U.S. interrogators from now on, or really from the beginning of his administration, but he will not look at the torture of the Bush officials. And that really, in a sense—it abandons his duty as what you might call the prosecutor-in-chief to not simply abide by the criminal law, but to enforce it, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor John Baker, your response?

JOHNBAKER: Well, first of all, there’s no definition of "torture." I mean, the throwing around of the word "torture" has been the problem in this whole thing. And there has not been the case made this morning that distinguishes what really is torture from broad accusations that they ordered torture. When you read those memos, much criticized by the antiwar left, you see that there was a serious attempt—you can disagree with it, but a serious attempt—to look at what the law was and to give legal guidance on that. That’s unprecedented. Other countries don’t do this. We take seriously our obligations.

And the idea that we would go and prosecute senior officials, the President and others, is simply beyond anything we’ve ever done in this country, and there’s no basis for it. I mean, if we’re going to have a situation where every time we have a change of party in the White House, that the new administration prosecutes the former administration, then we really are going down the path of some third-world countries. I mean, one can make a case against President Obama, for instance, that the use of drones to kill enemy—enemies in other countries is unnecessary, that instead we could capture them, and that he has gone well beyond self-defense. One can make that case. I’m not going to make it, but one can make it. I don’t want a future administration under Republicans coming in and talking about prosecuting Attorney General Holder or President Obama. I don’t think that that is healthy.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth? Let’s get Ken Roth to respond.

JOHNBAKER: And I don’t think it is justified.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth?

KENNETHROTH: All right. Well, first, with all due respect to Professor Baker, there is a definition of torture. It’s contained in the torture convention, which, Amy, you mentioned at the outset, an international treaty that the United States and 140-some other governments have ratified. And it says that torture is the intentional infliction of severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental. The kinds of techniques that we’re talking about clearly fall under that definition. A mock execution is a paradigmatic form of psychological torture. Everybody understands that. The U.S. has prosecuted others for engaging in that. That’s what waterboarding is. It’s mock execution by drowning. Similarly, imposing these painful stress positions on people for long periods, subjecting them to prolonged sleep deprivation, to extremes of hot and cold, to beating and the like, these are all classic forms of torture. I don’t think that’s really in dispute.

So, the real issue is, did the officials who ordered that kind of torture—should they be exempted just because they were members of the prior administration? Now, Professor Baker seems to say that it somehow—it politicizes the criminal law for one president to hold another to that law, to prosecute clear transgressions of the law. I don’t buy that. I think, and I think most Americans feel, that this nation is a nation of laws and that their politicians and government officials should not be exempt from that view. Now, obviously, there were some who took different points of view. President Nixon notoriously saw himself as the president and therefore above the law. But he was hounded from office. I don’t think anyone thinks that when an official like Bush or Cheney, Rumsfeld or Tenet commits serious violations of law by ordering the criminal act of torture, that simply because they were a senior official, they should be exempted.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go to one of the key pieces of evidence against former President George W. Bush, has been his own words. This was an interview he did last November with NBC’s Matt Lauer, in which President Bush openly admitted authorizing the use of torture on prisoners.

MATTLAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Because the lawyers said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer. And—but you got to trust the judgment of people around you. And I do.

MATTLAUER: You say it’s legal, and the lawyers told me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah.

MATTLAUER: Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Well—

MATTLAUER: Tom Kean, who was the former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, he obviously doesn’t know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That’s why I’ve written the book. He can—they can draw whatever conclusion they want.

MATTLAUER: If it’s legal, President Bush, then if an American is taken into custody in a foreign country, not necessarily a uniformed American—

GEORGE W. BUSH: Look, I’m not going to debate the issue, Matt. I really—

MATTLAUER: I’m just asking. Would it be OK for a foreign country to waterboard an American citizen?

GEORGE W. BUSH: It’s—all I ask is that people read the book. And they can reach the same conclusion if they would have made the same decision I made or not.

MATTLAUER: You’d make the same decision again today?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, I would.

AMYGOODMAN: That was George W. Bush speaking to Matt Lauer. Ken Roth?

KENNETHROTH: Well, I mean, first of all, Matt was absolutely correct to point to these legal opinions, because the Bush administration basically shopped around for the right legal opinion. They went down the hierarchy in the Justice Department. They found a very acquiescent individual, John Yoo, who wrote a memo, which if you read that memo, this is not an honest assessment of the law. This is a very partisan analysis designed to legalize something that’s illegal.

Now, for the President then to say, "Oh, well, my lawyer said it was legal, therefore I can do it," that’s completely disingenuous. It’s one thing for a sort of a low-level interrogator, who may not know the origins of a legal memo, to rely on it. But for the President, for Cheney, who put pressure on the various lawyers to approve the torture, who chose the authors of these memos, to then rely on this legal opinion, that’s basically just, you know, turning lawyers into members of the criminal conspiracy. That should not be grounds for any kind of defense to charges of torture.

AMYGOODMAN: By the way, we did invite Professor Yoo, now a law professor at University of California, Berkeley, to be on the broadcast, but he declined our request. Professor John Baker, your response to what Kenneth Roth has just said?

JOHNBAKER: Well, first of all, Amy, did you notice how you biased the statement? You said that President Bush admitted that he ordered torture. He never made such a statement at all. What you’ve done is to leap from what he said, and you labeled it torture. The reality is, if you read those memos—and the thing that is being lost here is that if you are going to turn war into a criminal process, then you at least ought to pay attention to criminal law. Now, there’s been no mention here that the essence of crime is specific intent. And the reason I’m focusing on the definition of torture is because that is in the statutory definition. There has to be specific intent to inflict this serious harm. And the memos go through it in great detail as to whether or not such and such is a serious harm and whether there is specific intent. Secondly, completely lost in this is the defense of self-defense and defense of others. That affects the definition of torture.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth.

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, well, on this argument of self-defense, again, with all due respect to Professor Baker, I would urge him to read the definition of the crime, because the crime focuses—

KENNETHROTH: —of severe pain or suffering. It doesn’t say it’s OK to impose severe pain if you have a good reason. It says, for whatever reason, if you impose that pain, it is a crime. So, you know, by Professor Baker’s view, if the interrogators were defending America, they could, you know, severely beat someone, they could rape the person, they can mutilate them. They could do whatever they wanted, because it was for a good cause: it was for self-defense. That’s not the law. The law prohibits the intentional infliction of pain or suffering in severe forms, regardless of the reason.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go back to John Yoo, the former Justice Department—

JOHNBAKER: Look, you don’t—

AMYGOODMAN: —attorney. John Baker—

JOHNBAKER: Could I come back in here, please?

AMYGOODMAN: Yeah, go ahead, for a quick second.

JOHNBAKER: Could I come back in here? Look, he simply doesn’t understand criminal law, because when you define a crime, it is not complete in its definition until you consider the defenses. So his narrowing of the definition is simply wrong. You know, I don’t know whether you teach criminal law, but you have to consider the defenses. And the definition of killing of another human being, of murder, depending on how you draft it, you don’t exclude the defenses. So, if you have a criminal code, which we don’t have at the federal level, what you do is you consider the offense, and you also consider the defenses. And what you’re doing is eliminating the defense. You’re saying that we can’t act in a legitimate way, even using force, to defend ourselves. And that is a completely absurd position.

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, let me just address that, because, first of all, Professor Baker, please don’t lecture me on criminal law. I was a federal prosecutor for five years in New York and Washington. I know exactly what I’m talking about. If the law were, as you say it is—

JOHNBAKER: Well, then you know what I’m talking about, that you can’t ignore the defenses.

KENNETHROTH: Let me finish. If the law were as you said it was, as long as the war were fought for defensive purposes, you would throw the Geneva Conventions out the door. You could do anything. You could mutilate prisoners. You could rape them. You could do whatever you want, as long as it was in self-defense. Believe me, that is not the law.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go to former Justice Department attorney John Yoo—

JOHNBAKER: That is not what—that—

AMYGOODMAN: —who defended his role in drafting the Bush administration torture memos. As I said, we did invite him on the show. He declined, but he did have a debate with you, Ken Roth, on the Charlie Rose show, where he defended the use of aggressive interrogation techniques.

JOHNYOO: The laws of war are enforced. You know, the laws of war, where we treat each other’s soldiers, give them prisoner of war status and so on, are enforced by reciprocal treatment. And that’s the idea that if we treat them—

CHARLIEROSE: But that’s when you have two nation states.

JOHNYOO: I know. Yeah, exactly. And so, that’s the problem, is that we are fighting an enemy that is not a nation state, either in Iraq with the insurgency or al-Qaeda throughout the world. They do not provide people with POW treatment. They don’t have POW bases. As far as we can tell, they don’t take prisoners, or they behead prisoners. And so, the question is, what is the benefit that we’re getting, in this particular war, by providing POW treatment or providing them with the kind of treatment we usually reserve for nation state regular armed forces, when if you use this other standard that we can give them under the law, we have the possibility of getting more information through aggressive interrogation techniques that could stop a future attack on the United States?

CHARLIEROSE: What’s the answer?

AMYGOODMAN: In the same interview, Yoo claimed Israel had decreased suicide attacks by using enhanced interrogation techniques.

JOHNYOO: The Israeli commission found that the use of these kind of aggressive interrogation techniques went broader than it was authorized for. They also found that a number—a high percentage of suicide bombers are stopped by information gathered from these kind of interrogations.

AMYGOODMAN: Kenneth Roth, your response to John Yoo’s assertions that America’s enemies are not nation states, so they’re not entitled to certain protections, and the assertion that torture ultimately works?

KENNETHROTH: Well, John Yoo was confusing two different issues. He refers to prisoner of war status, which indeed is reserved for conflicts between governments that respect the Geneva Conventions. But the prohibition on torture transcends that. That applies to any prisoner, whether a POW or a terrorist. If you’re in war or, for that matter, if it’s a regular criminal matter, no one can be tortured. There is—it is an absolute prohibition that has nothing to do with reciprocity.

Now, as to the argument that torture works, I mean, we heard this most recently with bin Laden’s killing. You know, Cheney got on the air and said, "Aha! It was because of the enhanced interrogation techniques." But if you look closely even at what Cheney says, he never claims that it was the torture or the enhanced interrogation technique that produced the information. He would say, you know, prisoners who had been subject to this helped in the capture of bin Laden. And indeed, when you start looking more closely at the evidence, it turns out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who of course was tortured 183 times under waterboarding, he lied about the key courier who ended up leading to bin Laden. So, even somebody who was subjected to these extreme forms of torture didn’t fess up the truth about what was going on. And if you talk to the professional interrogators, they will say that it’s far more effective to build a rapport with a person under interrogation and that that kind of voluntary cooperation is a much more valuable form to—of cracking these secretive criminal conspiracies than twisting somebody’s arm or subjecting them to waterboarding.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor John Baker?

JOHNBAKER: Well, on the first point, I agree with Mr. Roth that there is certainly a difference between the treatment accorded under a treaty as opposed to the torture provisions in our statute and well as the convention. And yes, there is a prohibition against torture of anybody. But again, we come back to what is torture. And Mr. Roth simply took the argument and expanded it. I’ve never argued that it is a general defense for everything. As Mr. Roth should know, if he was a former prosecutor, then when we look at self-defense or defense of others, it always depends on the particular circumstances. And if you read those memos, the circumstances were laid out. And carefully in the memos, they say, assuming that these are the facts and that these are only the facts and there aren’t any other facts, as the facts change, then it’s different. So, contrary to what Mr. Roth says and what many law professors believe, many who haven’t read this stuff or who don’t teach criminal law, there is a plausible argument in these memos. You may disagree with the argument. Lawyers disagree on all kinds of things. But to simply blanket and say that this was clearly torture, to me, is nonsense. It’s simply not good legal argument.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth, I wanted to follow up on another point in your report, encouraging other countries to prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. is not going to prosecute their own.

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, well, this is a serious problem. The United States regularly pushes other governments to prosecute their torturers, their war criminals. But when the U.S., as, you know, perhaps the most visible nation in the world, doesn’t abide by that same standard, it not only undermines U.S. credibility as a proponent of enforcing international human rights law, but it also sets a very visible negative example. I had this experience. I met a couple of years ago with the Egyptian prime minister at a point where we had just received evidence that a bunch of suspects, terrorism suspects, had been picked up and were being tortured. And I met with him in his office, and I pressed him to stop it. And without skipping a beat, he looked at me and said, "Well, that’s what Bush does." And now, that’s a cheap answer. We all know that. But it’s a politically effective answer. If a government as powerful as the United States is flouting its obligations to prosecute torturers, why do we expect anybody else to do that?

AMYGOODMAN: Should it be taken to the ICC, the International Criminal Court?

KENNETHROTH: Well, you know, unfortunately, the International Criminal Court doesn’t have jurisdiction over most of these cases. The only way it could get jurisdiction would be for the U.N. Security Council to hand it jurisdiction, and that’s not going to happen with the U.S. sitting there and exercising its veto. So, as a practical matter, I mean, we have a strong preference for domestic prosecutions. I think for Obama to live up to his obligation as prosecutor-in-chief and to authorize Attorney General Eric Holder to pursue these investigations, that would be the preferred model. But if that doesn’t work, the only real alternative is for other governments to prosecute under their power of universal jurisdiction. This is what Spain tried to do, and the Obama administration stepped in and stopped them.

AMYGOODMAN: And we know that from the WikiLeaks documents—

KENNETHROTH: Precisely.

AMYGOODMAN: —that trove of documents that are slowly being released. Julian Assange, as we speak, is in court. The significance of WikiLeaks for Human Rights Watch and gathering information, can you talk about that?

KENNETHROTH: Well, I have to say, the massive WikiLeaks leak largely confirmed what we already knew. I mean, it was, you know, I suppose, surprising to see that these State Department memos were reasonably well written. They were insightful. Their analysis wasn’t that far off from the analysis that Human Rights Watch researchers on the ground were providing. So, I didn’t see any great insights provided by the vast bulk of those documents, other than a kind of reconfirmation that the U.S. embassies are sort of seeing things as we see them. And the real issue is, what do they do about it? Sometimes they are pushing to protect human rights, but too often they’re not.

AMYGOODMAN: Final word, Professor Baker?

JOHNBAKER: Well, a couple of things. First of all, as to foreign leaders accusing us of ignoring torturers because people like Mr. Roth are accusing people in the United States of torture, when in fact the issue is whether there was or wasn’t torture. Secondly, this idea of universal jurisdiction in international law is highly controversial. Indeed, if there is universal jurisdiction, then there’s nothing left to sovereignty. If every country can extend its police powers beyond its borders, that’s a prescription not only for chaos; it’s actually a prescription for war.

AMYGOODMAN: Final question from what Professor Baker said, and this is to Ken Roth, when he said, well, then you should be looking at President Obama, their drone attacks killing civilians in Pakistan. What about that?

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, well, the drone attacks, the Obama administration says, are attacks on combatants. In war, you can shoot at the other side’s combatants. It’s very different from torturing somebody in custody. Now, Professor Baker says, oh, maybe there’s a self-defense argument. Let me say that there really isn’t, under any reasonable definition. But, you know, let’s bring that to a jury. The evidence is overwhelming that senior Bush officials authorized torture, more than enough for Eric Holder to prosecute, if Obama would just let him do that. He should.

AMYGOODMAN: We’ll leave it there. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Professor John Baker, of Louisiana State University Law School, professor emeritus there.

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Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400Maher Arar: My Rendition & Torture in Syrian Prison Highlights U.S. Reliance on Syria as an Allyhttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/13/maher_arar_my_rendition_torture_in
tag:democracynow.org,2011-06-13:en/story/7959dd AMY GOODMAN : As we continue on the issue of Syria, we&#8217;re joined by Maher Arar, a former victim of U.S. rendition, now a human rights activist in Canada. Maher Arar was seized in New York&#8217;s Kennedy Airport in September of 2002, and he was sent to Syria, where he was tortured and interrogated in a tiny underground cell for more than 10 months. He ultimately was returned to Canada. The Canadian government awarded him $10 million for what he went through. Maher Arar joins us now from Ottawa, Canada.
Welcome to Democracy Now! , Maher. Talk about, first, what happened to you. This isn&#8217;t now, during this current uprising; this was during the Bush government &mdash; but how you feel it relates to the &mdash; what&#8217;s happening in Syria today.
MAHER ARAR : Basically, my experience allows me to relate to what is happening right now, in terms of the massive human rights abuses, whether it&#8217;s torture or atrocity, you know, crimes committed against civilians. I know firsthand how brutal this regime could be. But again, what is unique in my case, as compared to what is happening in Syria right now, is I was sent to Syria by the supposedly democratic government. The U.S. government sent me there against my will in 2002.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, for people who are not familiar with your story &mdash; and people can go to democracynow.org, because we have chronicled your story since you were captured by the &mdash; well, I shouldn&#8217;t say &quot;captured,&quot; because you were at Kennedy Airport transiting through to Canada after a family vacation. But briefly explain what happened to you.
MAHER ARAR : Well, basically, I was transiting in New York on my way to Montreal, and I was stopped by the New York police, and eventually the FBI showed up. I was interrogated for about 10 hours, almost until midnight. And then I was chained and shackled. I was not read my rights. I was told I didn&#8217;t have a right to a lawyer. And I was eventually accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, based on classified information that they did not want to share with me. Of course, today we know what information that is, because there was an extensive inquiry in Canada, which cleared my name and gave some facts about what happened. And then I was kept at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, for about 10 days, after which I was bundled on a private jet to Jordan, from where I was transported to Syria and eventually psychologically and physically tortured.
I stayed in Syria, most of my time, in an underground cell which is the size of a coffin, basically. It&#8217;s about three feet wide, six feet high and about seven feet deep. It was a filthy place. It was dark. It&#8217;s basically &mdash; that&#8217;s why I always refer to it as a grave-like cell, because it reminds you of really a grave.
And I was eventually released and &mdash; because my wife had gone on a public campaign and pressured and lobbied the Canadian government to press for my release. And eventually there was an inquiry in Canada. There was a huge outrage, public outrage, here about what happened to me. And the inquiry took about three years, and reporters reported about what happened. I was eventually, you know, cleared. And the Canadian government was blamed for sending false information to their U.S. counterparts.
AMY GOODMAN : And you were awarded over $10 million by the Harper government, a Bush ally &mdash;
MAHER ARAR : Correct.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; which is extremely interesting here, although the U.S. government has never apologized for what happened to you.
MAHER ARAR : That is correct. I was &mdash; I launched a lawsuit upon my return, both in Canada and the U.S., separate lawsuits. The Canadian government chose to settle the lawsuit immediately after the inquiry. Unfortunately, the U.S. judicial system has been not very understanding and has been siding &mdash; or has sided with the U.S. government and took the U.S. government arguments, despite all the public information that exists today about what happened to me. And on top of that, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, apologized to myself and my family for what happened to us, even though the Canadian government role, when compared to the U.S. role, is really minor, in my opinion.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, this is very relevant to today, because I think most people would say the U.S. has not been an ally of Syria. And yet, in your case, it worked with Syria, though you said if they thought you were guilty of a crime, when you were taken from JFK , let them deport you to Canada, where you were a citizen, and let them try you. They actually sent you to Syria.
MAHER ARAR : Well, let me emphasize here, my case is probably unique in the sense that I was the only Syrian-born Canadian who was sent or renditioned to Syria from U.S. soil. But let me be clear here, there were many victims of rendition of Syrian origin who actually were rendered from Pakistan and other places to Syria. Now, why the &mdash; and let me also say that when the American government sent me to Syria, they knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, I can vividly remember what an ex- CIA agent said around 2004 about the rendition program. He basically something said like &mdash; if I remember correctly, his is name is Robert Baer. He said, &quot;If you want people to be well interrogated, you send them to Jordan. If you want people to be disappeared, you send them to Egypt. And if you want people to be tortured, you send them to Syria.&quot; And that&#8217;s exactly what ended up happening. So what this basically says is that whoever took the decision to send me to Syria, they knew, or they basically wanted me to be tortured in order to extract information, what we call today &quot;torture by proxy.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : That was Robert Baer, the ex- CIA agent. So, what do you think this means about the U.S. relationship with Syria today, how much sway the U.S. has, what the U.S. should be doing right now? We just got reports from Damascus and from the border, Amnesty describing this as a scorched earth policy against &mdash; well, against the Syrian government&#8217;s own people, that the Syrian government, that Bashar al-Assad, is engaging in right now.
MAHER ARAR : Well, the U.S. government has a huge responsibility for a simple reason. The cooperation with the Syrian government, as well as other dictatorships in the Middle East post-9/11, gave some kind of legitimacy to those dictatorships. And it is now &mdash; the prime responsibility of the U.S. government is to put the pressure on the Syrian government.
For instance, two things that the U.S. government can do right now. First of all, they have to declare this regime to be illegitimate, and they have forfeited their right to rule. Second, I think they have to press &mdash; and we&#8217;re here in Canada doing this, I mean, human rights activists and myself are actually pushing our government here to take a lead to refer this matter to the International Criminal Court.
Right now, the international community, including the U.S., is using very soft language, in my opinion. And imposing sanctions on some elements within the regime will not put much pressure. I think what needs to be done right now is to declare this regime to be illegitimate and also to refer this matter to the International Criminal Court as soon as possible. And that, in my opinion, will make a huge difference in terms of putting pressure on the regime.
AMY GOODMAN : Maher Arar, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Again, he was the victim of U.S. extraordinary rendition. He was seized at Kennedy Airport, sent to Syria in 2002, where he was held in a tiny underground cell for almost a year. He was tortured, physically, psychologically. Ultimately, the Canadian government awarded him more than $10 million. He now continues to live in Canada with his family. His wife ran for public office, where Maher Arar is a human rights advocate today. AMYGOODMAN: As we continue on the issue of Syria, we’re joined by Maher Arar, a former victim of U.S. rendition, now a human rights activist in Canada. Maher Arar was seized in New York’s Kennedy Airport in September of 2002, and he was sent to Syria, where he was tortured and interrogated in a tiny underground cell for more than 10 months. He ultimately was returned to Canada. The Canadian government awarded him $10 million for what he went through. Maher Arar joins us now from Ottawa, Canada.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Maher. Talk about, first, what happened to you. This isn’t now, during this current uprising; this was during the Bush government — but how you feel it relates to the — what’s happening in Syria today.

MAHERARAR: Basically, my experience allows me to relate to what is happening right now, in terms of the massive human rights abuses, whether it’s torture or atrocity, you know, crimes committed against civilians. I know firsthand how brutal this regime could be. But again, what is unique in my case, as compared to what is happening in Syria right now, is I was sent to Syria by the supposedly democratic government. The U.S. government sent me there against my will in 2002.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, for people who are not familiar with your story — and people can go to democracynow.org, because we have chronicled your story since you were captured by the — well, I shouldn’t say "captured," because you were at Kennedy Airport transiting through to Canada after a family vacation. But briefly explain what happened to you.

MAHERARAR: Well, basically, I was transiting in New York on my way to Montreal, and I was stopped by the New York police, and eventually the FBI showed up. I was interrogated for about 10 hours, almost until midnight. And then I was chained and shackled. I was not read my rights. I was told I didn’t have a right to a lawyer. And I was eventually accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, based on classified information that they did not want to share with me. Of course, today we know what information that is, because there was an extensive inquiry in Canada, which cleared my name and gave some facts about what happened. And then I was kept at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, for about 10 days, after which I was bundled on a private jet to Jordan, from where I was transported to Syria and eventually psychologically and physically tortured.

I stayed in Syria, most of my time, in an underground cell which is the size of a coffin, basically. It’s about three feet wide, six feet high and about seven feet deep. It was a filthy place. It was dark. It’s basically — that’s why I always refer to it as a grave-like cell, because it reminds you of really a grave.

And I was eventually released and — because my wife had gone on a public campaign and pressured and lobbied the Canadian government to press for my release. And eventually there was an inquiry in Canada. There was a huge outrage, public outrage, here about what happened to me. And the inquiry took about three years, and reporters reported about what happened. I was eventually, you know, cleared. And the Canadian government was blamed for sending false information to their U.S. counterparts.

AMYGOODMAN: And you were awarded over $10 million by the Harper government, a Bush ally —

MAHERARAR: Correct.

AMYGOODMAN: — which is extremely interesting here, although the U.S. government has never apologized for what happened to you.

MAHERARAR: That is correct. I was — I launched a lawsuit upon my return, both in Canada and the U.S., separate lawsuits. The Canadian government chose to settle the lawsuit immediately after the inquiry. Unfortunately, the U.S. judicial system has been not very understanding and has been siding — or has sided with the U.S. government and took the U.S. government arguments, despite all the public information that exists today about what happened to me. And on top of that, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, apologized to myself and my family for what happened to us, even though the Canadian government role, when compared to the U.S. role, is really minor, in my opinion.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, this is very relevant to today, because I think most people would say the U.S. has not been an ally of Syria. And yet, in your case, it worked with Syria, though you said if they thought you were guilty of a crime, when you were taken from JFK, let them deport you to Canada, where you were a citizen, and let them try you. They actually sent you to Syria.

MAHERARAR: Well, let me emphasize here, my case is probably unique in the sense that I was the only Syrian-born Canadian who was sent or renditioned to Syria from U.S. soil. But let me be clear here, there were many victims of rendition of Syrian origin who actually were rendered from Pakistan and other places to Syria. Now, why the — and let me also say that when the American government sent me to Syria, they knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, I can vividly remember what an ex-CIA agent said around 2004 about the rendition program. He basically something said like — if I remember correctly, his is name is Robert Baer. He said, "If you want people to be well interrogated, you send them to Jordan. If you want people to be disappeared, you send them to Egypt. And if you want people to be tortured, you send them to Syria." And that’s exactly what ended up happening. So what this basically says is that whoever took the decision to send me to Syria, they knew, or they basically wanted me to be tortured in order to extract information, what we call today "torture by proxy."

AMYGOODMAN: That was Robert Baer, the ex-CIA agent. So, what do you think this means about the U.S. relationship with Syria today, how much sway the U.S. has, what the U.S. should be doing right now? We just got reports from Damascus and from the border, Amnesty describing this as a scorched earth policy against — well, against the Syrian government’s own people, that the Syrian government, that Bashar al-Assad, is engaging in right now.

MAHERARAR: Well, the U.S. government has a huge responsibility for a simple reason. The cooperation with the Syrian government, as well as other dictatorships in the Middle East post-9/11, gave some kind of legitimacy to those dictatorships. And it is now — the prime responsibility of the U.S. government is to put the pressure on the Syrian government.

For instance, two things that the U.S. government can do right now. First of all, they have to declare this regime to be illegitimate, and they have forfeited their right to rule. Second, I think they have to press — and we’re here in Canada doing this, I mean, human rights activists and myself are actually pushing our government here to take a lead to refer this matter to the International Criminal Court.

Right now, the international community, including the U.S., is using very soft language, in my opinion. And imposing sanctions on some elements within the regime will not put much pressure. I think what needs to be done right now is to declare this regime to be illegitimate and also to refer this matter to the International Criminal Court as soon as possible. And that, in my opinion, will make a huge difference in terms of putting pressure on the regime.

AMYGOODMAN: Maher Arar, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Again, he was the victim of U.S. extraordinary rendition. He was seized at Kennedy Airport, sent to Syria in 2002, where he was held in a tiny underground cell for almost a year. He was tortured, physically, psychologically. Ultimately, the Canadian government awarded him more than $10 million. He now continues to live in Canada with his family. His wife ran for public office, where Maher Arar is a human rights advocate today.

]]>
Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400Federal Court Dismisses Lawsuit Against Boeing in CIA "Torture Flight" Programhttp://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/9/federal_court_dismisses_lawsuit_against_boeing
tag:democracynow.org,2010-09-09:en/story/767000 JUAN GONZALEZ : A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit about the CIA&#8217;s &quot;extraordinary rendition&quot; program under President Bush, which sent terrorism suspects abroad to be tortured. In a ruling issued Wednesday, a sharply divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Obama administration&#8217;s argument that the rendition program constitutes a state secret and its legality cannot be decided by courts.
The lawsuit was brought against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc. on behalf of five men who were kidnapped by the CIA , forcibly disappeared to US-run prisons overseas, and tortured. The men say that Jeppesen was complicit in their rendition to Morocco, Egypt and Afghanistan to be tortured. The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union nearly three-and-a-half years ago, and the Bush administration asserted the state secrets privilege to have the lawsuit thrown out.
AMY GOODMAN : As a senator and a candidate for president, Obama said he opposed the Bush administration&#8217;s use of the state secrets privilege. But once he became president, his Justice Department also argued the case should be dismissed on secrecy grounds. In his ruling on Wednesday, Judge Raymond Fisher said this was &quot;a rare case&quot; in which the government&#8217;s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs&#8217; need to have any day in court.
Well, we&#8217;re joined now here in New York by the lawyer who argued the case before the appeals court. Ben Wizner is a staff attorney with the ACLU&#8217;s National Security Project.
Ben, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened? The case has been thrown out.
BEN WIZNER : Well, again, we need to look at the broader context in which this case is not being allowed to go forward. We are now almost two years into the Obama administration. Not a single victim of the Bush administration&#8217;s torture regime has yet had his day in court. And that&#8217;s because both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have thrown up one after another procedural roadblock to make sure that these claims won&#8217;t be heard and to make sure that no court will be able to say what happened here was illegal, what happened to these people was a crime.
In this case, as you said in the lead in, the particular device that the administration used was the state secrets privilege. But although this may be viewed in the United States as an arcane dispute about an evidentiary privilege, we need to look at how the rest of the world sees this. And the rest of the world wants to know whether there will be any possibility in US courts for torture victims to have redress. And if the answer is no, if this decision is allowed to stand, we&#8217;re going to see the foreign prosecutors, magistrates, the Garzóns, the Spataros of the world, who have been on this program, we&#8217;re going to see those people reinvigorating their investigations into the Bush administration&#8217;s torture regime, because America can&#8217;t clean up its own mess.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, it&#8217;s been your understanding that state secrets have been used in the past around a particular part of evidence in a court proceeding, not over an entire proceeding. Could you explain that?
BEN WIZNER : Well, again, in this case, the Bush administration and then the Obama administration did not invoke the state secrets privilege in order to prevent the disclosure of a particular document, or even a particular piece of information. They invoked the privilege before the lawsuit had even gotten off the ground and said that the entire subject matter of this lawsuit was off-limits for judicial review. Remember, we are required, as a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, to provide a remedy for people who are torture victims. This use of the state secrets privilege violates our treaty obligations, violates international law.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s make this real, Ben. What happened to these men? Tell us about the five men you represented.
BEN WIZNER : These are individuals who were snatched off the street in various countries in Europe and the Middle East, were chained to the floor of airplanes, were flown off either to CIA -run black site secret prisons or to prisons run by Egypt and Morocco, were brutally tortured, were not charged or tried. The idea that this program is legal is so contradicted by the fact that the whole purpose of flying these people to other countries was to evade the law. Some ended up in Guantánamo, others in the intelligence prisons of foreign countries. And this Boeing subsidiary was a critical component in the CIA&#8217;s attempt to evade their legal responsibility, to hide what these flights were actually doing. And we know from an employee of this company that it was openly discussed within the company that these were the CIA&#8217;s torture flights and that they were making a handsome profit from these flights.
We brought this lawsuit on behalf of these five individuals to seek some measure of justice, some measure of compensation. And unfortunately, I&#8217;m afraid that if these five men are not permitted to have their claims heard, this may be the end of the line for torture victims trying to have their cases heard in US courts, because there are no secrets in this cases. These stories are incredibly well known, not just having been published in newspapers, but these men have been the subject of foreign legal proceedings. There&#8217;s no real secrecy, or this is not about secrecy. This is about shielding criminals from liability.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And the degree to which the Obama administration has reversed its early pronouncements in the first years of taking &mdash; in the first days of taking office?
BEN WIZNER : Well, I think that we are now seeing the consequences of President Obama&#8217;s mantra that we should look forward instead of looking backward. The problem is, this is not about the President; this is about the presidency. President Obama will not be president forever, and there is a dangerous possibility that his successor will return to these kinds of policies. It&#8217;s not enough for this administration to say, &quot;We are not running secret prisons. We&#8217;re not torturing people.&quot; Without a definitive ruling by a court that what happened was illegal and unacceptable, there is a real danger that we&#8217;ll see a repeat of these abuses.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you appealing the case to the Supreme Court?
BEN WIZNER : Absolutely. We are going to ask the Supreme Court to review this. And I hope that the Supreme Court will see this in an international context, that you see now many other countries, including our closest allies like the United Kingdom, are investigating their secondary role in the Bush administration&#8217;s torture regime. The US really stands alone in closing all doors to accountability and not conducting a serious criminal investigation and not allowing victims their day in court. And our hope is that the Supreme Court, the justices of which do spend time around the world meeting with other judges, will see that America is becoming an outlier and that it&#8217;s losing its reputation as a human rights defender.
AMY GOODMAN : Ben Wizner, we want to thank you for being with us, staff attorney in the ACLU&#8217;s National Security Project.JUANGONZALEZ: A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit about the CIA’s "extraordinary rendition" program under President Bush, which sent terrorism suspects abroad to be tortured. In a ruling issued Wednesday, a sharply divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Obama administration’s argument that the rendition program constitutes a state secret and its legality cannot be decided by courts.

The lawsuit was brought against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc. on behalf of five men who were kidnapped by the CIA, forcibly disappeared to US-run prisons overseas, and tortured. The men say that Jeppesen was complicit in their rendition to Morocco, Egypt and Afghanistan to be tortured. The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union nearly three-and-a-half years ago, and the Bush administration asserted the state secrets privilege to have the lawsuit thrown out.

AMYGOODMAN: As a senator and a candidate for president, Obama said he opposed the Bush administration’s use of the state secrets privilege. But once he became president, his Justice Department also argued the case should be dismissed on secrecy grounds. In his ruling on Wednesday, Judge Raymond Fisher said this was "a rare case" in which the government’s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs’ need to have any day in court.

Well, we’re joined now here in New York by the lawyer who argued the case before the appeals court. Ben Wizner is a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project.

Ben, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened? The case has been thrown out.

BENWIZNER: Well, again, we need to look at the broader context in which this case is not being allowed to go forward. We are now almost two years into the Obama administration. Not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture regime has yet had his day in court. And that’s because both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have thrown up one after another procedural roadblock to make sure that these claims won’t be heard and to make sure that no court will be able to say what happened here was illegal, what happened to these people was a crime.

In this case, as you said in the lead in, the particular device that the administration used was the state secrets privilege. But although this may be viewed in the United States as an arcane dispute about an evidentiary privilege, we need to look at how the rest of the world sees this. And the rest of the world wants to know whether there will be any possibility in US courts for torture victims to have redress. And if the answer is no, if this decision is allowed to stand, we’re going to see the foreign prosecutors, magistrates, the Garzóns, the Spataros of the world, who have been on this program, we’re going to see those people reinvigorating their investigations into the Bush administration’s torture regime, because America can’t clean up its own mess.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, it’s been your understanding that state secrets have been used in the past around a particular part of evidence in a court proceeding, not over an entire proceeding. Could you explain that?

BENWIZNER: Well, again, in this case, the Bush administration and then the Obama administration did not invoke the state secrets privilege in order to prevent the disclosure of a particular document, or even a particular piece of information. They invoked the privilege before the lawsuit had even gotten off the ground and said that the entire subject matter of this lawsuit was off-limits for judicial review. Remember, we are required, as a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, to provide a remedy for people who are torture victims. This use of the state secrets privilege violates our treaty obligations, violates international law.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s make this real, Ben. What happened to these men? Tell us about the five men you represented.

BENWIZNER: These are individuals who were snatched off the street in various countries in Europe and the Middle East, were chained to the floor of airplanes, were flown off either to CIA-run black site secret prisons or to prisons run by Egypt and Morocco, were brutally tortured, were not charged or tried. The idea that this program is legal is so contradicted by the fact that the whole purpose of flying these people to other countries was to evade the law. Some ended up in Guantánamo, others in the intelligence prisons of foreign countries. And this Boeing subsidiary was a critical component in the CIA’s attempt to evade their legal responsibility, to hide what these flights were actually doing. And we know from an employee of this company that it was openly discussed within the company that these were the CIA’s torture flights and that they were making a handsome profit from these flights.

We brought this lawsuit on behalf of these five individuals to seek some measure of justice, some measure of compensation. And unfortunately, I’m afraid that if these five men are not permitted to have their claims heard, this may be the end of the line for torture victims trying to have their cases heard in US courts, because there are no secrets in this cases. These stories are incredibly well known, not just having been published in newspapers, but these men have been the subject of foreign legal proceedings. There’s no real secrecy, or this is not about secrecy. This is about shielding criminals from liability.

JUANGONZALEZ: And the degree to which the Obama administration has reversed its early pronouncements in the first years of taking — in the first days of taking office?

BENWIZNER: Well, I think that we are now seeing the consequences of President Obama’s mantra that we should look forward instead of looking backward. The problem is, this is not about the President; this is about the presidency. President Obama will not be president forever, and there is a dangerous possibility that his successor will return to these kinds of policies. It’s not enough for this administration to say, "We are not running secret prisons. We’re not torturing people." Without a definitive ruling by a court that what happened was illegal and unacceptable, there is a real danger that we’ll see a repeat of these abuses.

AMYGOODMAN: Are you appealing the case to the Supreme Court?

BENWIZNER: Absolutely. We are going to ask the Supreme Court to review this. And I hope that the Supreme Court will see this in an international context, that you see now many other countries, including our closest allies like the United Kingdom, are investigating their secondary role in the Bush administration’s torture regime. The US really stands alone in closing all doors to accountability and not conducting a serious criminal investigation and not allowing victims their day in court. And our hope is that the Supreme Court, the justices of which do spend time around the world meeting with other judges, will see that America is becoming an outlier and that it’s losing its reputation as a human rights defender.

AMYGOODMAN: Ben Wizner, we want to thank you for being with us, staff attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project.]]>

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400Torture, Rendition Victim Maher Arar Asks Supreme Court to Allow Suit Against US Gov'thttp://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/2/torture_rendition_victim_maher_arar_asks
tag:democracynow.org,2010-02-02:en/story/67023a AMY GOODMAN : Bill Quigley, finally, your center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, represents Maher Arar. He’s asking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling blocking him from suing the US government.
BILL QUIGLEY : Yes. This is another example of the courts failing to uphold their duty as a check or a balance to the actions of Congress or the administration. And the courts have said, look, maybe it’s true that this guy was kidnapped, maybe it’s true that he was rendered and he was tortured and held in a little underground burial spot for a year, and it’s true that he was innocent, but this is not something for the courts to get into, because this looks into sensitive issues of foreign policy, sensitive issues of secrecy. Well, that is just &mdash; it’s a green light for the government to do whatever they want, under whatever circumstances.
And this is a guy who was snatched by the United States government at JFK Airport in New York and sent to Syria. So, I mean, it’s not something that happened in another place. We took him off of a plane in JFK , that he was going to Canada, and gave him to the Syrians, sent him to Syria to be tortured for a year, because people thought he was a terrorist, which he wasn’t. And unless the Supreme Court rises and reasserts its role, the role of the courts to hold the government accountable, then this is immunity for John Ashcroft and Bush officials, and it is impunity of the kind that we criticize countries for around the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Bill Quigley, I want to thank you for being with us, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, just recently back from Haiti.AMYGOODMAN: Bill Quigley, finally, your center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, represents Maher Arar. He’s asking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling blocking him from suing the US government.

BILLQUIGLEY: Yes. This is another example of the courts failing to uphold their duty as a check or a balance to the actions of Congress or the administration. And the courts have said, look, maybe it’s true that this guy was kidnapped, maybe it’s true that he was rendered and he was tortured and held in a little underground burial spot for a year, and it’s true that he was innocent, but this is not something for the courts to get into, because this looks into sensitive issues of foreign policy, sensitive issues of secrecy. Well, that is just — it’s a green light for the government to do whatever they want, under whatever circumstances.

And this is a guy who was snatched by the United States government at JFK Airport in New York and sent to Syria. So, I mean, it’s not something that happened in another place. We took him off of a plane in JFK, that he was going to Canada, and gave him to the Syrians, sent him to Syria to be tortured for a year, because people thought he was a terrorist, which he wasn’t. And unless the Supreme Court rises and reasserts its role, the role of the courts to hold the government accountable, then this is immunity for John Ashcroft and Bush officials, and it is impunity of the kind that we criticize countries for around the world.

AMYGOODMAN: Bill Quigley, I want to thank you for being with us, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, just recently back from Haiti.]]>

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500Appeals Court Rules in Maher Arar Case: Innocent Victims of Extraordinary Rendition Cannot Sue in US Courtshttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/3/appeals_court_rules_in_maher_arar
tag:democracynow.org,2009-11-03:en/story/8e8955 AMY GOODMAN : On Monday, a federal court of appeals dismissed Canadian citizen Maher Arar’s case against US officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that victims of extraordinary rendition cannot sue Washington for torture suffered overseas, because Congress has not authorized such lawsuits.
In 2002, Syrian-born Maher Arar was held in New York on his way back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia. A subsequent Canadian public inquiry has shown Arar was held on erroneous advice from Canadian officials who accused him of ties to Islamic militants. US authorities then flew Arar to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year. Canadian authorities exonerated Arar in 2007, apologized for their role in his torture, and awarded him a multi-million-dollar settlement.
Following Monday’s 7-to-4 verdict, Maher Arar said, quote, &quot;this recent decision and decisions taken on other similar cases, prove that the court system in the United States has become more or less a tool that the executive branch can easily manipulate through unfounded allegations and fear mongering. If anything, this decision is a loss to all Americans and to the rule of law,&quot; he said.
In his dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, quote, &quot;I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today&#8217;s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.&quot;
For more on this case, I’m joined here in our firehouse studio by Maher Arar’s attorney Maria LaHood. She’s a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARIA LAHOOD : Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the significance of this.
MARIA LAHOOD : Well, what the decision was, the court decided 7-to-4 that even if &mdash; or assuming that what Maher says is true, which we all assume at this point, that he was prevented from going to court in order to stop federal officials from sending him to Syria to be tortured and that he was in fact sent to Syria to be tortured &mdash; even assuming that’s true, he has no remedy in the United States federal courts.
And the court said that was for two reasons. One, because of foreign policy and national security, the court was going to defer to the executive on their policy. First of all, Maher doesn’t challenge the policy; he challenges what happened to him, being sent to Syria to be tortured. Second of all, it’s the courts role to uphold our rights and to be the check and balance for the executive branch. The second reason was for secrecy purposes. Basically, the court said if state secrets might be at issue &mdash; the court didn’t reach whether state secrets was &mdash; it was better to have a decision to preclude a remedy in open court rather than having to deal with classified information. It’s an outrage.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to Maher Arar in his own words right now. Two years ago, he described his ordeal in videotaped testimony to the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. He spoke via videoconference because he’s barred from entering the United States.
MAHER ARAR : Let me be clear: I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group.
I am here today to tell you about what happened to me and how I was detained and interrogated by the United States government, transported to Syria against my will, tortured and kept there for a year.
Upon viewing my valid Canadian passport, an immigration officer pulled me aside. Officers from the FBI and the New York Police Department arrived and began to interrogate me. My repeated requests for a lawyer were all denied. I was told that I had no right to a lawyer, because I was not an American citizen.
I was then taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where I was kept for the next ten days. After five days of repeated requests, I was finally allowed to make a brief phone call to alert my family of my whereabouts.
On October 8th at 3:00 in the morning, I was awakened and told that they had decided to remove me to Syria. By then, it was becoming more and more clear to me that I was being sent to Syria for the purpose of being tortured.
There, I was put in a dark underground cell that was more like a grave. It was three feet wide, six feet deep and seven feet high. Life in that cell was hell. I spent ten months and ten days in that grave.
During the early days of my detention, I was interrogated and physically tortured. I was beaten with an electrical cable and threatened with a metal chair, the tire and electric shocks. I was forced to falsely confess that I had been to Afghanistan. When I was not being beaten, I was put in a waiting room so that I could hear the screams of other prisoners. The cries of the women still haunt me the most.
After 374 days of torture and wrongful detention, I was finally released to Canadian embassy officials on October 5th, 2003.
These past few years have been a nightmare for me. Since my return to Canada, my physical pain has slowly healed, but the cognitive and psychological scars from my ordeal remain with me on a daily basis. I still have nightmares and recurring flashbacks. I am not the same person that I was. I also hope to convey how fragile our human rights have become and how easily they can be taken from us by the same governments that have sworn to protect them.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Maher Arar describing his own ordeal before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. I shouldn’t exactly say “before” the committee; he’s not allowed into the United States, so he spoke via video conference, barred from entering this country. I mean, that is a very graphic description, Maria LaHood. What exactly does this mean, that the US government can take someone from US soil, US citizen or otherwise, and send them off to another country that they know engages in torture?
MARIA LAHOOD : Absolutely, and even that if they intend them to be tortured. And it doesn’t have to be a foreign citizen. This decision is broad enough to affect any of us. Basically, if the federal government decides to do something that it purports to be in our national security to do, they could torture any of us, they could kill any of us, and there would be no relief in the federal courts.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the dissenting opinion of Judge Guido Calabresi.
MARIA LAHOOD : Well, as you quoted from him earlier, he says that, you know, he thinks that history will look with dismay on this decision. He talks a lot about how the courts have really turned the separation of powers notion on their head. You know, here, the majority says that it must defer to the executive, because of separation of powers, but he points out that separation of powers is the reason that courts must actually uphold the law and challenge what the executive does. He really looks to the long view.
And he &mdash; one of his statements is that he &mdash; he adds these words in his dissent &mdash; there were four dissents, all of them really well done &mdash; that he adds them in sorrow more than anger, because of how much this opinion reaches out, you know, he says, in judicial activism. And he uses it in the real meaning of the term, which is that they &mdash; this court decided things they didn’t have to decide. They eliminated rights they didn’t have to eliminate. They could have dealt with state secrets. They could have decided the issue more narrowly, but they didn’t. They basically reached out to eliminate a remedy.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you appealing the decision?
MARIA LAHOOD : We haven’t decided whether or not we’ll petition the Supreme Court for review, but it does seem like it’s a difficult thing to let this decision stand.
AMY GOODMAN : Why would you leave it?
MARIA LAHOOD : You know, there’s other things that I think need to be done. I don&#8217;t know what the Supreme Court would do. You know, there could be a remedy in Congress. There could be prosecutions. The reason Maher brought this case, to begin with, was accountability. He wanted to make sure that this didn’t happen again and also to get some acknowledgment of what was done to him and an apology.
AMY GOODMAN : The remedy in the House could be a bill forbidding extraordinary rendition?
MARIA LAHOOD : It could be a bill forbidding extraordinary rendition, providing specifically for remedy, as the court called out, although we don’t think that’s necessary. It could be a particular bill for an apology and compensation for Maher.
AMY GOODMAN : He has gotten what? He settled for $10 million from the Canadian government &mdash;-
MARIA LAHOOD : From the Canadian government.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash;- for their participation in the giving information over to the US government that was false that led to his rendition.
MARIA LAHOOD : Exactly, exactly. Not having anything to do with the US’s role.
AMY GOODMAN : Are there cases now relating to extraordinary rendition in the courts?
MARIA LAHOOD : There&#8217;s currently a case brought by five victims of extraordinary rendition in the Ninth Circuit, en banc , against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary who was involved with the flight plans for the renditions. And there, the district court dismissed on state secrets &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : So this is Jeppesen based in California?
MARIA LAHOOD : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : That flew the planes, that flew [inaudible] -&mdash;
MARIA LAHOOD : They dealt with the flight plans for the planes for the trips for the extraordinary renditions.
AMY GOODMAN : Mm-hmm.
MARIA LAHOOD : The district court there dismissed on state secrets. The Ninth Circuit actually remanded to the district court to re-review the state secrets, saying that what it is is an evidentiary privilege, it’s not a reason to dismiss the case all out. And the full Ninth Circuit has decided to rehear that opinion in December.
AMY GOODMAN : Maria LaHood, I want to thank you for being with us, Maher Arar’s attorney here in the United States. She’s a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights based here in New York.AMYGOODMAN: On Monday, a federal court of appeals dismissed Canadian citizen Maher Arar’s case against US officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that victims of extraordinary rendition cannot sue Washington for torture suffered overseas, because Congress has not authorized such lawsuits.

In 2002, Syrian-born Maher Arar was held in New York on his way back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia. A subsequent Canadian public inquiry has shown Arar was held on erroneous advice from Canadian officials who accused him of ties to Islamic militants. US authorities then flew Arar to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year. Canadian authorities exonerated Arar in 2007, apologized for their role in his torture, and awarded him a multi-million-dollar settlement.

Following Monday’s 7-to-4 verdict, Maher Arar said, quote, "this recent decision and decisions taken on other similar cases, prove that the court system in the United States has become more or less a tool that the executive branch can easily manipulate through unfounded allegations and fear mongering. If anything, this decision is a loss to all Americans and to the rule of law," he said.

In his dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, quote, "I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay."

For more on this case, I’m joined here in our firehouse studio by Maher Arar’s attorney Maria LaHood. She’s a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARIALAHOOD: Thanks for having me.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the significance of this.

MARIALAHOOD: Well, what the decision was, the court decided 7-to-4 that even if — or assuming that what Maher says is true, which we all assume at this point, that he was prevented from going to court in order to stop federal officials from sending him to Syria to be tortured and that he was in fact sent to Syria to be tortured — even assuming that’s true, he has no remedy in the United States federal courts.

And the court said that was for two reasons. One, because of foreign policy and national security, the court was going to defer to the executive on their policy. First of all, Maher doesn’t challenge the policy; he challenges what happened to him, being sent to Syria to be tortured. Second of all, it’s the courts role to uphold our rights and to be the check and balance for the executive branch. The second reason was for secrecy purposes. Basically, the court said if state secrets might be at issue — the court didn’t reach whether state secrets was — it was better to have a decision to preclude a remedy in open court rather than having to deal with classified information. It’s an outrage.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to Maher Arar in his own words right now. Two years ago, he described his ordeal in videotaped testimony to the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. He spoke via videoconference because he’s barred from entering the United States.

MAHERARAR: Let me be clear: I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group.

I am here today to tell you about what happened to me and how I was detained and interrogated by the United States government, transported to Syria against my will, tortured and kept there for a year.

Upon viewing my valid Canadian passport, an immigration officer pulled me aside. Officers from the FBI and the New York Police Department arrived and began to interrogate me. My repeated requests for a lawyer were all denied. I was told that I had no right to a lawyer, because I was not an American citizen.

I was then taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where I was kept for the next ten days. After five days of repeated requests, I was finally allowed to make a brief phone call to alert my family of my whereabouts.

On October 8th at 3:00 in the morning, I was awakened and told that they had decided to remove me to Syria. By then, it was becoming more and more clear to me that I was being sent to Syria for the purpose of being tortured.

There, I was put in a dark underground cell that was more like a grave. It was three feet wide, six feet deep and seven feet high. Life in that cell was hell. I spent ten months and ten days in that grave.

During the early days of my detention, I was interrogated and physically tortured. I was beaten with an electrical cable and threatened with a metal chair, the tire and electric shocks. I was forced to falsely confess that I had been to Afghanistan. When I was not being beaten, I was put in a waiting room so that I could hear the screams of other prisoners. The cries of the women still haunt me the most.

After 374 days of torture and wrongful detention, I was finally released to Canadian embassy officials on October 5th, 2003.

These past few years have been a nightmare for me. Since my return to Canada, my physical pain has slowly healed, but the cognitive and psychological scars from my ordeal remain with me on a daily basis. I still have nightmares and recurring flashbacks. I am not the same person that I was. I also hope to convey how fragile our human rights have become and how easily they can be taken from us by the same governments that have sworn to protect them.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Maher Arar describing his own ordeal before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. I shouldn’t exactly say “before” the committee; he’s not allowed into the United States, so he spoke via video conference, barred from entering this country. I mean, that is a very graphic description, Maria LaHood. What exactly does this mean, that the US government can take someone from US soil, US citizen or otherwise, and send them off to another country that they know engages in torture?

MARIALAHOOD: Absolutely, and even that if they intend them to be tortured. And it doesn’t have to be a foreign citizen. This decision is broad enough to affect any of us. Basically, if the federal government decides to do something that it purports to be in our national security to do, they could torture any of us, they could kill any of us, and there would be no relief in the federal courts.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the dissenting opinion of Judge Guido Calabresi.

MARIALAHOOD: Well, as you quoted from him earlier, he says that, you know, he thinks that history will look with dismay on this decision. He talks a lot about how the courts have really turned the separation of powers notion on their head. You know, here, the majority says that it must defer to the executive, because of separation of powers, but he points out that separation of powers is the reason that courts must actually uphold the law and challenge what the executive does. He really looks to the long view.

And he — one of his statements is that he — he adds these words in his dissent — there were four dissents, all of them really well done — that he adds them in sorrow more than anger, because of how much this opinion reaches out, you know, he says, in judicial activism. And he uses it in the real meaning of the term, which is that they — this court decided things they didn’t have to decide. They eliminated rights they didn’t have to eliminate. They could have dealt with state secrets. They could have decided the issue more narrowly, but they didn’t. They basically reached out to eliminate a remedy.

AMYGOODMAN: Are you appealing the decision?

MARIALAHOOD: We haven’t decided whether or not we’ll petition the Supreme Court for review, but it does seem like it’s a difficult thing to let this decision stand.

AMYGOODMAN: Why would you leave it?

MARIALAHOOD: You know, there’s other things that I think need to be done. I don’t know what the Supreme Court would do. You know, there could be a remedy in Congress. There could be prosecutions. The reason Maher brought this case, to begin with, was accountability. He wanted to make sure that this didn’t happen again and also to get some acknowledgment of what was done to him and an apology.

AMYGOODMAN: The remedy in the House could be a bill forbidding extraordinary rendition?

MARIALAHOOD: It could be a bill forbidding extraordinary rendition, providing specifically for remedy, as the court called out, although we don’t think that’s necessary. It could be a particular bill for an apology and compensation for Maher.

AMYGOODMAN: He has gotten what? He settled for $10 million from the Canadian government —-

MARIALAHOOD: From the Canadian government.

AMYGOODMAN: —- for their participation in the giving information over to the US government that was false that led to his rendition.

MARIALAHOOD: Exactly, exactly. Not having anything to do with the US’s role.

AMYGOODMAN: Are there cases now relating to extraordinary rendition in the courts?

MARIALAHOOD: There’s currently a case brought by five victims of extraordinary rendition in the Ninth Circuit, en banc, against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary who was involved with the flight plans for the renditions. And there, the district court dismissed on state secrets —-

AMYGOODMAN: So this is Jeppesen based in California?

MARIALAHOOD: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: That flew the planes, that flew [inaudible] -—

MARIALAHOOD: They dealt with the flight plans for the planes for the trips for the extraordinary renditions.

AMYGOODMAN: Mm-hmm.

MARIALAHOOD: The district court there dismissed on state secrets. The Ninth Circuit actually remanded to the district court to re-review the state secrets, saying that what it is is an evidentiary privilege, it’s not a reason to dismiss the case all out. And the full Ninth Circuit has decided to rehear that opinion in December.

AMYGOODMAN: Maria LaHood, I want to thank you for being with us, Maher Arar’s attorney here in the United States. She’s a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights based here in New York.]]>

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500Ex-CIA Officials Tied to Rendition Program and Faulty Iraq Intel Tapped to Head Obama's Intelligence Transition Teamhttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/17/obama_taps_ex_cia_officials_tied
tag:democracynow.org,2008-11-17:en/story/cebe7a AMY GOODMAN : It’s been less than two weeks since Obama&#8217;s election. Speculation is already rife about the change he intends to bring to Washington’s intelligence community. The Washington Post reported last week that Obama is expected to replace the country’s top two intelligence officials over their support for controversial Bush administration policies like torture and electronic surveillance. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA chief Michael Hayden reportedly wish to remain on the job.
No appointees have been named as yet, but questions are already being raised about the people heading Obama’s transition efforts on intelligence policy. John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading the review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration. Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq.
I&#8217;m joined now by Washington, D.C. &mdash; in D.C. by former CIA and State Department analyst Mel Goodman. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, director of the Center&#8217;s National Security Project. His latest book is called Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA . He is also co-author of Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk .
We’re joined here in New York by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. His latest book is The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book .
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to start with Mel Goodman in Washington. Long years at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. You’ve just written an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun that looks at these two top transition officials. Explain who they are and what they represent.
MELVIN GOODMAN : Well, I think it’s important to understand who John Brennan is. He &mdash; [no audio]
AMY GOODMAN : We seem to have lost the sound, Mel Goodman. Let’s see if we &mdash; if we have it back. Mel, can you hear us?
MELVIN GOODMAN : Can you hear me?
AMY GOODMAN : Hi. Can you hear us, Mel Goodman?
MELVIN GOODMAN : I can hear you fine.
AMY GOODMAN : OK, good. Now we hear you fine. So just start from the top. Talk about Brennan.
MELVIN GOODMAN : OK. John Brennan was deputy executive secretary to George Tenet during the worst violations during the CIA period in the run-up to the Iraq war, so he sat there at Tenet’s knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse, on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of all of that decision making.
Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director for Intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war. So she went along with the phony intelligence estimate of October 2002, the phony white paper that was prepared by Paul Pillar in October 2002. She helped with the drafting of the speech that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations &mdash; [inaudible] 2003, which made the phony case for war to the international community.
So, when George Tenet said, &quot;slam dunk, we can provide all the intelligence you need,” [inaudible] to the President in December of 2002, it was people like Jami Miscik and John Brennan who were part of the team who provided that phony intelligence. So what I think people at the CIA are worried about &mdash; and I’ve talked to many of them over the weekend &mdash; is that there will never be any accountability for these violations and some of the unconscionable acts committed at the CIA , which essentially amount to war crimes, when you&#8217;re talking about torture and abuse and secret prisons. So, where are we, in terms of change? This sounds like more continuity.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to excerpts from a December 2005 interview with John Brennan, the former CIA official now leading Obama’s intelligence transition. Brennan was interviewed by Margaret Warner on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about his views on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition.
MARGARET WARNER : So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?
JOHN BRENNAN : I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now for the past decade with the cases of rendition that the US government has been involved in, and I can say, without a doubt, that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.
MARGARET WARNER : So is it &mdash; are you saying both &mdash; in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?
JOHN BRENNAN : Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And US government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.
MARGARET WARNER : Why would you not, if this &mdash; if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?
JOHN BRENNAN : No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we&#8217;re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen, and the Egyptians then have a longer history, in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.
AMY GOODMAN : That’s John Brennan, who heads up the transition team on intelligence. Mel Goodman?
MELVIN GOODMAN : Well, John Brennan is being completely dishonest there. All of the operational people I&#8217;ve talked to know that the people who were turned over to the Arab intelligence services &mdash; and remember, this is Egypt, this is Syria, this is Jordan, this is Saudi Arabia &mdash; that all of these foreign intelligence services commit torture and abuse. Now, if any of these suspects had anything to say to us that was of any utility, we would have kept them. We would have controlled these people. They would have become our sources and our assets. When we turned them over, we were turning over people who we felt had very little to offer, and we were turning over them to them, to the Arab liaison services for torture and abuse.
John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right &mdash; and there were a few who tried to get it right &mdash; is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama&#8217;s judgment about a national security team, it’s very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what we&#8217;re learning now.
AMY GOODMAN : In fact, NPR attributed Obama&#8217;s reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.
MELVIN GOODMAN : Well, then you have to wonder who he’s relying on, in terms of advice, to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon, which I think is another example of continuity and not change. You mean to tell me that there are no Democrats who are qualified to become the Secretary of Defense? Bob Gates has supported all of the policies that Obama said he was going to look at very carefully and seemed to oppose: expansion of NATO , bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO , deployment of missiles in Poland, deployment of radars in the Czech Republic, the continued acquisition of a national missile defense, which is the most expensive item in the Pentagon&#8217;s procurement project, an item that we’ve spent over $500 billion on in the last forty years. This is &mdash; again, this is not change; this is continuity.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael Ratner, as you listen to John Brennan, again, heading up the transition team on intelligence, your thoughts?
MICHAEL RATNER : Well, it’s extremely, extremely disturbing. When you read Jane Mayer’s book, the worst and most onerous chapter is the chapter on what the CIA did to people in secret sites, from small coffins to waterboarding. John Brennan was there at the time. To hear him say that this stuff works is really &mdash; or that it’s very important to do is really remarkable. He’s saying that at the same time when we know about the Center’s client, Maher Arar, being sent to Syria, tortured, so-called diplomatic assurances somehow able to protect him. Another Guantanamo people &mdash; other Guantanamo people sent to Egypt with the worst kind of torture. So, the idea that Brennan, who should probably, along with Tenet, be facing some kind of war crimes trial, is actually heading the transition on this is extremely disturbing.
AMY GOODMAN : And Jamie Miscik, Mel Goodman, talk about her significance.
MELVIN GOODMAN : Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director &mdash; she was the Deputy Director of Intelligence during the run-up to the war and in the immediate postwar period. That was a period of politicized intelligence. That was a period of the corruption of the process. That was a period when all analytic trade craft, all of the rules of analytic trade craft were ignored. She passed judgment on the October 2002 estimate. She passed on the white paper, which was the phony paper that violated the CIA charter, because it took classified material and then declassified it and sent to the Congress only days before the vote on the authorization to use force in Iraq in October 2002.
She was part of the slam-dunk team that George Tenet was so proud of that prepared a phony &mdash; not only that phony estimate, but the speech that Colin Powell gave, that outrageous speech with twenty-eight allegations, all of them false, prepared in February of 2003, which was the case to the international community. Hundreds of millions of people heard that phony speech, and it’s still an embarrassment to Colin Powell to this very day. She was part of the team that allowed George Bush to go before this country in January of 2003 in a State of the Union address and use a fabricated intelligence report to say that Iraq was getting enriched uranium from a West African country. Jami Miscik was a part of all of this.
And a lot of us were very pleased when Porter Goss actually fired Jami Miscik. My guess is he probably fired her for the wrong reasons and not the right reasons, but we were glad to see her go.
And now, for Obama to turn around, put Jami Miscik back in the CIA in transition and Brennan in the transition process, and then you look at people such as the former deputy to Tenet, John McLaughlin, who is also an intelligence adviser, and Rob Richer, who was a key operations adviser, who was the deputy to Jose Rodriguez, who is now being investigated by the Justice Department for the illegal destruction of the torture tapes, you know, you have to wonder, who is Obama relying on for advice on the Washington community? He’s only been in Washington, we know, for two years, and obviously there are things he needs to know about national security, the CIA and the intelligence community. And obviously, he’s listening to the wrong people.
AMY GOODMAN : Mel Goodman, I want to thank you for being with us, former CIA and State Department analyst. His latest book is called Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA .AMYGOODMAN: It’s been less than two weeks since Obama’s election. Speculation is already rife about the change he intends to bring to Washington’s intelligence community. The Washington Post reported last week that Obama is expected to replace the country’s top two intelligence officials over their support for controversial Bush administration policies like torture and electronic surveillance. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA chief Michael Hayden reportedly wish to remain on the job.

No appointees have been named as yet, but questions are already being raised about the people heading Obama’s transition efforts on intelligence policy. John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading the review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration. Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq.

I’m joined now by Washington, D.C. — in D.C. by former CIA and State Department analyst Mel Goodman. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, director of the Center’s National Security Project. His latest book is called Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. He is also co-author of Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk.

We’re joined here in New York by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. His latest book is The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to start with Mel Goodman in Washington. Long years at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. You’ve just written an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun that looks at these two top transition officials. Explain who they are and what they represent.

MELVINGOODMAN: Well, I think it’s important to understand who John Brennan is. He — [no audio]

AMYGOODMAN: We seem to have lost the sound, Mel Goodman. Let’s see if we — if we have it back. Mel, can you hear us?

MELVINGOODMAN: Can you hear me?

AMYGOODMAN: Hi. Can you hear us, Mel Goodman?

MELVINGOODMAN: I can hear you fine.

AMYGOODMAN: OK, good. Now we hear you fine. So just start from the top. Talk about Brennan.

MELVINGOODMAN: OK. John Brennan was deputy executive secretary to George Tenet during the worst violations during the CIA period in the run-up to the Iraq war, so he sat there at Tenet’s knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse, on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of all of that decision making.

Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director for Intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war. So she went along with the phony intelligence estimate of October 2002, the phony white paper that was prepared by Paul Pillar in October 2002. She helped with the drafting of the speech that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations — [inaudible] 2003, which made the phony case for war to the international community.

So, when George Tenet said, "slam dunk, we can provide all the intelligence you need,” [inaudible] to the President in December of 2002, it was people like Jami Miscik and John Brennan who were part of the team who provided that phony intelligence. So what I think people at the CIA are worried about — and I’ve talked to many of them over the weekend — is that there will never be any accountability for these violations and some of the unconscionable acts committed at the CIA, which essentially amount to war crimes, when you’re talking about torture and abuse and secret prisons. So, where are we, in terms of change? This sounds like more continuity.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to excerpts from a December 2005 interview with John Brennan, the former CIA official now leading Obama’s intelligence transition. Brennan was interviewed by Margaret Warner on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about his views on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition.

MARGARETWARNER: So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHNBRENNAN: I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now for the past decade with the cases of rendition that the US government has been involved in, and I can say, without a doubt, that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARETWARNER: So is it — are you saying both — in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHNBRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And US government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.

MARGARETWARNER: Why would you not, if this — if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?

JOHNBRENNAN: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we’re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen, and the Egyptians then have a longer history, in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s John Brennan, who heads up the transition team on intelligence. Mel Goodman?

MELVINGOODMAN: Well, John Brennan is being completely dishonest there. All of the operational people I’ve talked to know that the people who were turned over to the Arab intelligence services — and remember, this is Egypt, this is Syria, this is Jordan, this is Saudi Arabia — that all of these foreign intelligence services commit torture and abuse. Now, if any of these suspects had anything to say to us that was of any utility, we would have kept them. We would have controlled these people. They would have become our sources and our assets. When we turned them over, we were turning over people who we felt had very little to offer, and we were turning over them to them, to the Arab liaison services for torture and abuse.

John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right — and there were a few who tried to get it right — is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama’s judgment about a national security team, it’s very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what we’re learning now.

AMYGOODMAN: In fact, NPR attributed Obama’s reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.

MELVINGOODMAN: Well, then you have to wonder who he’s relying on, in terms of advice, to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon, which I think is another example of continuity and not change. You mean to tell me that there are no Democrats who are qualified to become the Secretary of Defense? Bob Gates has supported all of the policies that Obama said he was going to look at very carefully and seemed to oppose: expansion of NATO, bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, deployment of missiles in Poland, deployment of radars in the Czech Republic, the continued acquisition of a national missile defense, which is the most expensive item in the Pentagon’s procurement project, an item that we’ve spent over $500 billion on in the last forty years. This is — again, this is not change; this is continuity.

AMYGOODMAN: Michael Ratner, as you listen to John Brennan, again, heading up the transition team on intelligence, your thoughts?

MICHAELRATNER: Well, it’s extremely, extremely disturbing. When you read Jane Mayer’s book, the worst and most onerous chapter is the chapter on what the CIA did to people in secret sites, from small coffins to waterboarding. John Brennan was there at the time. To hear him say that this stuff works is really — or that it’s very important to do is really remarkable. He’s saying that at the same time when we know about the Center’s client, Maher Arar, being sent to Syria, tortured, so-called diplomatic assurances somehow able to protect him. Another Guantanamo people — other Guantanamo people sent to Egypt with the worst kind of torture. So, the idea that Brennan, who should probably, along with Tenet, be facing some kind of war crimes trial, is actually heading the transition on this is extremely disturbing.

AMYGOODMAN: And Jamie Miscik, Mel Goodman, talk about her significance.

MELVINGOODMAN: Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director — she was the Deputy Director of Intelligence during the run-up to the war and in the immediate postwar period. That was a period of politicized intelligence. That was a period of the corruption of the process. That was a period when all analytic trade craft, all of the rules of analytic trade craft were ignored. She passed judgment on the October 2002 estimate. She passed on the white paper, which was the phony paper that violated the CIA charter, because it took classified material and then declassified it and sent to the Congress only days before the vote on the authorization to use force in Iraq in October 2002.

She was part of the slam-dunk team that George Tenet was so proud of that prepared a phony — not only that phony estimate, but the speech that Colin Powell gave, that outrageous speech with twenty-eight allegations, all of them false, prepared in February of 2003, which was the case to the international community. Hundreds of millions of people heard that phony speech, and it’s still an embarrassment to Colin Powell to this very day. She was part of the team that allowed George Bush to go before this country in January of 2003 in a State of the Union address and use a fabricated intelligence report to say that Iraq was getting enriched uranium from a West African country. Jami Miscik was a part of all of this.

And a lot of us were very pleased when Porter Goss actually fired Jami Miscik. My guess is he probably fired her for the wrong reasons and not the right reasons, but we were glad to see her go.

And now, for Obama to turn around, put Jami Miscik back in the CIA in transition and Brennan in the transition process, and then you look at people such as the former deputy to Tenet, John McLaughlin, who is also an intelligence adviser, and Rob Richer, who was a key operations adviser, who was the deputy to Jose Rodriguez, who is now being investigated by the Justice Department for the illegal destruction of the torture tapes, you know, you have to wonder, who is Obama relying on for advice on the Washington community? He’s only been in Washington, we know, for two years, and obviously there are things he needs to know about national security, the CIA and the intelligence community. And obviously, he’s listening to the wrong people.

AMYGOODMAN: Mel Goodman, I want to thank you for being with us, former CIA and State Department analyst. His latest book is called Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.]]>